Populists' initial reaction to Oprah's candidate announcement speech may be dread -- even more so if many others like her join the race. Then it will be the Democrats who will be holding a clown car show in 2020.
But that will benefit the Bernie wing of the party, if they manage to run only one candidate, whether Bernie himself or a suitable successor.
Oprah is just going to be another tired and hated identity politics warrior, more focused on her personal story and generic motivational speeches than on re-industrialization of the economy, shrinking our military footprint around the world, single-payer healthcare, and so on and so forth.
And she will definitely have at least one other rival for that sales pitch -- Michelle Obama. Neither of these "strong black women" will step aside for the other, and since they will both be selling the same appeal to voters, they will get similar slices of the electoral pie.
The more candidates there are who are selling one form or another of Democrat politics as usual, the smaller each of those slices will be. They won't take away much from Bernie's share of the pie, since he is such a qualitatively different choice.
Let's say Bernie only gets 45% of the delegates, based on winning over voters who want populism and major change -- but that the remaining 55% are divided evenly among 11 candidates in an over-crowded Establishment field. That leaves each one of the non-Bernie candidates with a puny 5%. Some may do a little better at 10% or 15%, some worse at around 1%. But nothing close to 45%.
In that case, it would start a nationwide riot to give the nomination to anyone other than Bernie. Not even all of the superdelegates could raise a candidate from 15% to 50% -- let alone the lesser candidates who got 5% or 1%. Robbing Bernie of the nomination would require a real bald-faced rigging like re-writing the rules, also bound to set off a riot.
The ideal plan to get a populist or progressive into the nomination, then, is to only run one candidate in that mold. Don't let individual ambition and hyper-competitiveness get in the way of the team movement. Bernie has better name and brand recognition than anyone else, including Elizabeth Warren. He's also more motivating to listen to, compared to Warren's schoolmarm demeanor.
Zogby polling for potential candidates shows Bernie with a solid 10-15 point advantage over Warren, as of late 2017. So the first move is to persuade Warren not to run, and better yet to endorse Bernie early on to solidify his status as the only populist candidate.
Then the goal is to encourage as many candidates to run who would blindly go along with the Wall Street and Pentagon agendas. Ideally they offer different flavors of Democrat politics as usual, to split up the non-Bernie vote.
Offer the strong black woman story, perhaps in two flavors itself with Oprah and Michelle. Offer the gay Hispanic story. Offer the futuristic tech overlord story. Offer the token ethnic on Wall Street story.
None of their substantive policies would differ from one other -- they would simply be rubber-stamping whatever Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and the CIA slid onto their desk. But they would split up the non-Bernie voters, with black women choosing Michelle or Oprah, white male nerds choosing Zuckerberg, tax-avoiding yuppies choosing Andrew Cuomo, etc.
The more hyper-competitive the non-Bernie candidates are, the better. They will spend so much time tearing into each other, and not wanting to be the one to fall on their own sword in order to block Bernie. We want maximum chaos and internecine warfare on the Establishment side -- just like there was among Republicans in 2016, clearing an easy path for Trump, who was from a different universe compared to the rest of them.
The more petty, the more egotistical, the more vapid and devoid of anything to say on real policies -- the more disgusted the non-airhead voters will be, and the easier the choice will be to go with Bernie. "Airhead" voters here meaning those going with identity politics.
The sense of desperation to "stop Trump" and to take back the White House will give these freaks the delusion of grandeur, as though they were heroic for wanting to return to the Clinton-Obama ways of the past. And that phony sense of heroism will keep them in the race for as long as possible, splitting up the non-Bernie vote all the way.
Here is an off-the-cuff list of ideal candidates to crowd the non-Bernie field with:
Hillary Clinton
Michelle Obama
Oprah Winfrey
Kamala Harris
Cory Booker
Mark Zuckerberg
Andrew Cuomo
Al Gore
Julian Castro
Etc.
In contrast to the backbiting shitshow going on among these Establishment candidates, I'd like to see Bernie pick Tulsi Gabbard early on as the de facto running mate -- a regular opening act to his rallies, a regular surrogate in the media, and a regular activist to mobilize larger networks to GOTV. Supposing Bernie gets the nomination, she's already a familiar presence, ideologically in step with him but making up for his weakness in foreign policy.
She's charismatic, and not that it matters to non-airhead voters, but she can deflect charges of the Bernie campaign being the white guy ticket. Being much younger makes her a credible and reassuring back-up President in case anything happened to Bernie in office.
In general, the image on the populist side would be harmony and productive teamwork, juxtaposed with the cynical individualistic ambition on the Establishment side.
If there's not much excitement going on in the GOP primary -- a big if, assuming Trump is running again after being sidelined by "his own" party for the first term, and assuming further that no bitter Republicans challenge him -- then only Bernie could draw a large number of populist Trump supporters into the Democrat primary. He won't need to point out what horrific prospects they would face if Kamala Harris or Cory Booker were President.
That would also ease fears about him being less electable -- he's the only one who can bring back the Trump voters who generally sympathize with the Democrat side in presidential races. We want populism, not identity politics.
So please, let's encourage as many Oprah Winfreys, Mark Cubans, and Mark Zuckerbergs to run as possible. And lean on Warren to not run herself, if she were considering it, rather than split up the populist / progressive team.
January 8, 2018
Electoral map reflects patronage, not demographics
With more talks about giving amnesty to large numbers of illegal immigrants, the Right is dragging out an old but wrong argument about how amnesty will turn states Democrat, relying as ever on California as the canary in the coalmine.
It is a non-starter, since California is one of the states where Democrats win the presidential vote even among white voters only. During the Bush-Obama years, these states included the entire West Coast, the Lutheran Triangle of MN, WI, and IA, and the Northeast beginning with NY.
So whatever turned the West Coast into a Democrat bastion has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. An earlier post covered this in detail: amnesty would be suicide for the Dems, not the GOP. Dems have labor unions in their electoral base who would get wiped out by cheap foreign labor, their safe blue states do not benefit from being even more blue-voting, and the purple Rust Belt states they won before Trump have almost no immigrants in them.
But let's move onto the topic of how the electoral map changes over time, not just what the cross-section looks like at a snapshot in time. Do demographic changes result in electoral changes?
Within the regions that would defect from the GOP electoral base of the Nixon-Reagan era, it was the Pacific NW states that left first in 1988, with California trailing in '92. Likewise the Lutheran Triangle states defected first in '88, followed by Illinois in '92. In the states with at least some portion lying in Appalachia, it was West Virginia to defect first in '88, followed in '92 by Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Maryland, etc.
The trend in demographic changes was the opposite -- at 60% white circa 1990, California should have fallen before Oregon and Washington, which were still 90% white. Similarly for the Lutheran Triangle states compared to Illinois, or West Virginia compared to Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc. The whitest states flipped blue first within their region.
Texas should have flipped blue decades ago, if demographics mattered. It is scarcely whiter than California in each of the Censuses from 1990 through 2010, and the percentage has declined steadily as well. And yet Texas remains one of the bastions of the GOP at all levels of government.
Turning to blacks instead of Hispanics as the non-white group, they make up the largest share of the population in the Deep South -- another bastion of the GOP at all levels.
And it's not as though all of the various shifts in the electoral maps since our nation's founding are tracking changes in racial or ethnic composition. A good theory explains as much of the data as possible, and the ethnic-oriented theory limits itself at best to the post-Civil Rights era for blacks as the non-white group, and the post-1986 amnesty for Hispanics.
A superior theory views parties as coalitions of elite factions representing the most powerful sectors of society -- banks, tech, media, military, energy, agriculture, etc. These coalitions use the party system to advance their material interests -- whichever party is controlled by the military, will push for higher troop deployments and weapons procurement, and whichever party is controlled by the banks will work harder to deregulate financial activity.
This is similar to Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of party competition, although without having read his books, I'm not sure whether he stresses non-businesses like the military (or the church, in an older time).
Currently the Democrats are controlled by finance, tech, and the media (informational, labor-insensitive), while the Republicans are controlled by the military, agriculture, and energy sectors (material, labor-intensive). It used to be different, though, with the Democrats being the militarist party for much of the 20th century, as their electoral base was the Deep South ("the Solid South") with its heavy concentration of military-related jobs.
As that example suggests, the electoral map will reflect which economic sectors are the major patrons of the local workforce. None of those sectors is uniformly distributed around the country -- there's lots of farmland in the Great Plains, but not in Rhode Island. There's a concentration of tech firms around Silicon Valley but not in Montana, banks along the Bos-Wash Corridor but not in the South, and oil fields in Texas but not in Massachusetts.
Getting back to California, what flipped it blue from 1992 to today, compared to its solid red or swing state status during the previous decades, was the evaporation of the military sector as the Cold War drew to a close. There used to be all sorts of major military installations in California, but many were shuttered by the Base Realignment and Closure program, whose targets were announced in 1988. Any work that was lateral to these bases, or downstream of them, would have dried up as well.
In place of Cold War or WWII-era military activity, the new activity in California circa 1990 and after would fall within the informational tech sector, as well as the finance sector (venture capital) that gave them their start-up funding. It's not as though these sectors provide all employment in the state, but if you're living and voting in California, you are more likely to currently have a job, or be searching for a job, in those sectors rather than at a military base or a farm.
Sure enough, these differences appear even within California -- the Bay Area is the bluest, with its concentration of tech, finance, and higher ed employment, while the red parts of the state are the agricultural plantations further inland, along with the lone major military installation of the San Diego Naval Base.
Since the shift in the electoral map around 1990, there hasn't been much of a change in which parts of the country rely heavily on agriculture or energy extraction (a little more in Ohio recently with fracking). The main change was the downsizing of military-related employment once the Cold War was over, which subtracts a lot of voters from the reliable Republican column.
But those same areas along the West Coast also saw the growth of tech firms, which were related to the former military spending -- most major R&D is paid for by the government, with the Defense Department paying the most. Without DoD-funded research laying the solid foundation, there would be no Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, or Google. These informational firms that supplanted the military bases took the West Coast states from a mere loss for the GOP to a solid gain for the Democrats. They might have turned into purple swing states if they had only lost the military work without any informational sectors to fill the void.
If Texas ever turns blue, it will be for the same reason. It will be hard to flip since it is home to all three major GOP sectors -- military bases, oil fields, and ranches and farmland. But over time, maybe some of those will fade out, and more tech firms pop up around Austin, more finance jobs pop up around Dallas, and more media outlets base themselves there for cheaper office rents. As more residents seek work in those sectors, rather than the material sectors, they will vote more Democrat in order to make a living off of its patronage network rooted in the informational sectors.
The same goes for Georgia, another state the Dems are hoping to flip. But not until there are different major employers. The South and Texas are the regions least affected by the military closures after the Cold War -- the fighting spirit of the Celtic people who settled these regions is not going to let them get rid of all their military installations. So they're reliably Republican as long as that party remains the one controlled by the military.
How strongly is the Southern vote tied to the military? In 1952 and '56, the whole country voted Republican except for the South. This was Eisenhower, not a Civil Rights crusader like Johnson in '64. Why didn't they like Ike? Since the country was enjoying post-WWII prosperity, the main campaign issue was the Korean War -- begun as usual by a Democrat (Truman), who used to be the militarist party, with their Solid South electoral base.
Eisenhower campaigned on exiting the Korean War, which he delivered on, and ended up slashing the military budget in half afterwards since they were no longer in a major war. That's not good for the military patronage flowing to the South, so they were the only region to reject him (both times).
How did Trump win back the Rust Belt for Republicans? He promised to revive a patronage network with them as the beneficiaries -- bringing their manufacturing sector back to life. He didn't have much of a record to point to, but it's not like the Democrats did either (although they do have a superior record on voting against free trade deals). Unlike the West Coast, the Rust Belt did not see a surge in tech or finance companies during the post-Cold War transition away from military employment. So they were left in purple / swing state status.
And they decided to gamble on Trump, the would-be patron of manufacturing. To the extent they notice factories returning, hiring more people, for full-time, benefit-bringing jobs, with good pay, they'll keep on betting on the GOP.
If they don't notice their factories coming roaring back to life, and if Pennsylvania doesn't notice steel rising from the grave, they will dump the GOP as failed patrons and go back to being mild blue states. They don't have much energy production or military bases (outside of Wright-Patterson AFB in swing-state Ohio), although they do have a decent level of agriculture. On the other hand, there's not a lot of tech start-ups, though there are some financial and insurance companies, and large state schools.
It will all come down to who gets the manufacturing sector voters. They ought to be protected by the material sector party, the GOP, but the greedy manufacturing employers have decided to renege on being patrons to the locals and sent their jobs out of the country to be done by cheap labor. They will vote with whichever party wants to slam enough tariffs on their employers to force them to become patrons of their state's economy again.
That would naturally be the Democrats, but we'll see if they can get their act together, while pointing out the failure of the GOP to deliver on Trump's protectionist crusade themes of the campaign.
Pennsylvania would also be helped back into the GOP column by re-opening the massive naval base and shipyard that used to be in Philadelphia -- the nation's first one, and a shame to have been put on the death list early in the post-Cold War era.
I probably shouldn't share that secret, since I've soured on the GOP and would like PA to go back to blue-under-Bernie. But it just shows how little the GOP wants to win the presidency -- destroying patronage networks for large-population states that were not deep red to begin with, and where residents have responded to the betrayal by their former patrons by voting for the other party instead.
So that's what changes a state from being for one party or the other -- changes in which sectors are patrons in the local economy, as well as changes in which party a sector finds itself in a coalition with. Both are subject to change over time.
The least insightful way to analyze politics is focusing on race and ethnicity. It's only good if the goal is anthropology, or the sociology of race and inter-racial dynamics. But not how power is wielded and toward what ends in the political realm, which is rooted entirely in economics.
As for opposing amnesty, that leaves two main arguments: 1) wanting to preserve American culture, and 2) wanting to prevent a lower standard-of-living among Americans as they compete economically with immigrants (lower wages, higher rents).
The standard losing argument is "to prevent one or more states from turning into Democrat bastions". Already you've lost the Democrats, who would be open to the working-class protection argument, as well as most Independents, who want to keep the option open of voting for either party. Plus it ignores what the Democrats stand for -- not long ago, they were the militarist party, then it changed to the non-militarist party. Obsessing over partisan victory per se marks you as an airheaded cheerleader with no vision or direction.
I say focus mostly on the economic argument -- if you can win over enough Independents and Democrats, you will get the same outcome as if you had argued on the much tougher argument about cultural preservation. As long as we keep down immigration and send back the ones already here, we will have preserved our American culture -- regardless of how we argued for it. Just get it done however it needs to get done, and enjoy the cultural benefits afterward.
It is a non-starter, since California is one of the states where Democrats win the presidential vote even among white voters only. During the Bush-Obama years, these states included the entire West Coast, the Lutheran Triangle of MN, WI, and IA, and the Northeast beginning with NY.
So whatever turned the West Coast into a Democrat bastion has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. An earlier post covered this in detail: amnesty would be suicide for the Dems, not the GOP. Dems have labor unions in their electoral base who would get wiped out by cheap foreign labor, their safe blue states do not benefit from being even more blue-voting, and the purple Rust Belt states they won before Trump have almost no immigrants in them.
But let's move onto the topic of how the electoral map changes over time, not just what the cross-section looks like at a snapshot in time. Do demographic changes result in electoral changes?
Within the regions that would defect from the GOP electoral base of the Nixon-Reagan era, it was the Pacific NW states that left first in 1988, with California trailing in '92. Likewise the Lutheran Triangle states defected first in '88, followed by Illinois in '92. In the states with at least some portion lying in Appalachia, it was West Virginia to defect first in '88, followed in '92 by Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Maryland, etc.
The trend in demographic changes was the opposite -- at 60% white circa 1990, California should have fallen before Oregon and Washington, which were still 90% white. Similarly for the Lutheran Triangle states compared to Illinois, or West Virginia compared to Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc. The whitest states flipped blue first within their region.
Texas should have flipped blue decades ago, if demographics mattered. It is scarcely whiter than California in each of the Censuses from 1990 through 2010, and the percentage has declined steadily as well. And yet Texas remains one of the bastions of the GOP at all levels of government.
Turning to blacks instead of Hispanics as the non-white group, they make up the largest share of the population in the Deep South -- another bastion of the GOP at all levels.
And it's not as though all of the various shifts in the electoral maps since our nation's founding are tracking changes in racial or ethnic composition. A good theory explains as much of the data as possible, and the ethnic-oriented theory limits itself at best to the post-Civil Rights era for blacks as the non-white group, and the post-1986 amnesty for Hispanics.
A superior theory views parties as coalitions of elite factions representing the most powerful sectors of society -- banks, tech, media, military, energy, agriculture, etc. These coalitions use the party system to advance their material interests -- whichever party is controlled by the military, will push for higher troop deployments and weapons procurement, and whichever party is controlled by the banks will work harder to deregulate financial activity.
This is similar to Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of party competition, although without having read his books, I'm not sure whether he stresses non-businesses like the military (or the church, in an older time).
Currently the Democrats are controlled by finance, tech, and the media (informational, labor-insensitive), while the Republicans are controlled by the military, agriculture, and energy sectors (material, labor-intensive). It used to be different, though, with the Democrats being the militarist party for much of the 20th century, as their electoral base was the Deep South ("the Solid South") with its heavy concentration of military-related jobs.
As that example suggests, the electoral map will reflect which economic sectors are the major patrons of the local workforce. None of those sectors is uniformly distributed around the country -- there's lots of farmland in the Great Plains, but not in Rhode Island. There's a concentration of tech firms around Silicon Valley but not in Montana, banks along the Bos-Wash Corridor but not in the South, and oil fields in Texas but not in Massachusetts.
Getting back to California, what flipped it blue from 1992 to today, compared to its solid red or swing state status during the previous decades, was the evaporation of the military sector as the Cold War drew to a close. There used to be all sorts of major military installations in California, but many were shuttered by the Base Realignment and Closure program, whose targets were announced in 1988. Any work that was lateral to these bases, or downstream of them, would have dried up as well.
In place of Cold War or WWII-era military activity, the new activity in California circa 1990 and after would fall within the informational tech sector, as well as the finance sector (venture capital) that gave them their start-up funding. It's not as though these sectors provide all employment in the state, but if you're living and voting in California, you are more likely to currently have a job, or be searching for a job, in those sectors rather than at a military base or a farm.
Sure enough, these differences appear even within California -- the Bay Area is the bluest, with its concentration of tech, finance, and higher ed employment, while the red parts of the state are the agricultural plantations further inland, along with the lone major military installation of the San Diego Naval Base.
Since the shift in the electoral map around 1990, there hasn't been much of a change in which parts of the country rely heavily on agriculture or energy extraction (a little more in Ohio recently with fracking). The main change was the downsizing of military-related employment once the Cold War was over, which subtracts a lot of voters from the reliable Republican column.
But those same areas along the West Coast also saw the growth of tech firms, which were related to the former military spending -- most major R&D is paid for by the government, with the Defense Department paying the most. Without DoD-funded research laying the solid foundation, there would be no Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, or Google. These informational firms that supplanted the military bases took the West Coast states from a mere loss for the GOP to a solid gain for the Democrats. They might have turned into purple swing states if they had only lost the military work without any informational sectors to fill the void.
If Texas ever turns blue, it will be for the same reason. It will be hard to flip since it is home to all three major GOP sectors -- military bases, oil fields, and ranches and farmland. But over time, maybe some of those will fade out, and more tech firms pop up around Austin, more finance jobs pop up around Dallas, and more media outlets base themselves there for cheaper office rents. As more residents seek work in those sectors, rather than the material sectors, they will vote more Democrat in order to make a living off of its patronage network rooted in the informational sectors.
The same goes for Georgia, another state the Dems are hoping to flip. But not until there are different major employers. The South and Texas are the regions least affected by the military closures after the Cold War -- the fighting spirit of the Celtic people who settled these regions is not going to let them get rid of all their military installations. So they're reliably Republican as long as that party remains the one controlled by the military.
How strongly is the Southern vote tied to the military? In 1952 and '56, the whole country voted Republican except for the South. This was Eisenhower, not a Civil Rights crusader like Johnson in '64. Why didn't they like Ike? Since the country was enjoying post-WWII prosperity, the main campaign issue was the Korean War -- begun as usual by a Democrat (Truman), who used to be the militarist party, with their Solid South electoral base.
Eisenhower campaigned on exiting the Korean War, which he delivered on, and ended up slashing the military budget in half afterwards since they were no longer in a major war. That's not good for the military patronage flowing to the South, so they were the only region to reject him (both times).
How did Trump win back the Rust Belt for Republicans? He promised to revive a patronage network with them as the beneficiaries -- bringing their manufacturing sector back to life. He didn't have much of a record to point to, but it's not like the Democrats did either (although they do have a superior record on voting against free trade deals). Unlike the West Coast, the Rust Belt did not see a surge in tech or finance companies during the post-Cold War transition away from military employment. So they were left in purple / swing state status.
And they decided to gamble on Trump, the would-be patron of manufacturing. To the extent they notice factories returning, hiring more people, for full-time, benefit-bringing jobs, with good pay, they'll keep on betting on the GOP.
If they don't notice their factories coming roaring back to life, and if Pennsylvania doesn't notice steel rising from the grave, they will dump the GOP as failed patrons and go back to being mild blue states. They don't have much energy production or military bases (outside of Wright-Patterson AFB in swing-state Ohio), although they do have a decent level of agriculture. On the other hand, there's not a lot of tech start-ups, though there are some financial and insurance companies, and large state schools.
It will all come down to who gets the manufacturing sector voters. They ought to be protected by the material sector party, the GOP, but the greedy manufacturing employers have decided to renege on being patrons to the locals and sent their jobs out of the country to be done by cheap labor. They will vote with whichever party wants to slam enough tariffs on their employers to force them to become patrons of their state's economy again.
That would naturally be the Democrats, but we'll see if they can get their act together, while pointing out the failure of the GOP to deliver on Trump's protectionist crusade themes of the campaign.
Pennsylvania would also be helped back into the GOP column by re-opening the massive naval base and shipyard that used to be in Philadelphia -- the nation's first one, and a shame to have been put on the death list early in the post-Cold War era.
I probably shouldn't share that secret, since I've soured on the GOP and would like PA to go back to blue-under-Bernie. But it just shows how little the GOP wants to win the presidency -- destroying patronage networks for large-population states that were not deep red to begin with, and where residents have responded to the betrayal by their former patrons by voting for the other party instead.
So that's what changes a state from being for one party or the other -- changes in which sectors are patrons in the local economy, as well as changes in which party a sector finds itself in a coalition with. Both are subject to change over time.
The least insightful way to analyze politics is focusing on race and ethnicity. It's only good if the goal is anthropology, or the sociology of race and inter-racial dynamics. But not how power is wielded and toward what ends in the political realm, which is rooted entirely in economics.
As for opposing amnesty, that leaves two main arguments: 1) wanting to preserve American culture, and 2) wanting to prevent a lower standard-of-living among Americans as they compete economically with immigrants (lower wages, higher rents).
The standard losing argument is "to prevent one or more states from turning into Democrat bastions". Already you've lost the Democrats, who would be open to the working-class protection argument, as well as most Independents, who want to keep the option open of voting for either party. Plus it ignores what the Democrats stand for -- not long ago, they were the militarist party, then it changed to the non-militarist party. Obsessing over partisan victory per se marks you as an airheaded cheerleader with no vision or direction.
I say focus mostly on the economic argument -- if you can win over enough Independents and Democrats, you will get the same outcome as if you had argued on the much tougher argument about cultural preservation. As long as we keep down immigration and send back the ones already here, we will have preserved our American culture -- regardless of how we argued for it. Just get it done however it needs to get done, and enjoy the cultural benefits afterward.
January 4, 2018
Mediterranean girls covering "I'm Not the Only One" by Sam Smith
This is one of the better songs in recent years -- catchy, though in a more mellow and soulful way, coming down from the frenetic highs of the burst of bouncy music from 2012-'13. The emotional tone is that of someone who is staying in a relationship despite knowing their partner is being unfaithful.
Naturally it should be sung by a girl, but they gave it to different infidelity-prone group instead -- homosexual Sam Smith. His tone is too whiny, making for a jarring mismatch between the juvenile emotional tone and the mature lyrics and sound. It sounds like a bratty little kid playing dress-up as an adult, typical of homosexual relationships.
Looking through YouTube covers of the song by female singers, you find too many that are juvenile in a different way -- from typical Millennials who have never had real emotional contact with other people, let alone in an intimate way. The result is artificial -- overly articulated enunciation, deadpan emotional tone, and just not being able to get in the right mood.
But there are a few decent clingy covers, all of them oddly enough from girls of Mediterranean background -- it must not be an unfamiliar mood for them to get into, of someone who gets cheated on and clings to their partner anyway. You couldn't hear a good cover coming from sexually non-dimorphic Scandinavia. The original version was written and performed by people of Celtic background, so it would be nice to hear a cover by another blue-eyed soul Celt like Adele.
Beginning with the best rendition I could find, here's Dua Lipa, of eastern Med background (Albanian):
Next is Mia Rose of western Med background (Portuguese):
A trip to the central Med (Italian) with Caterina Cropelli:
And finally an honorable mention to Luciana Zogbi (Lebanese Catholic), which is a little too rehearsed (child recital-like), rather than from the soul, but still not as obsessed with emo-diva melisma as the typical cover of the song is:
As the big music studios continue to give womanly songs to the homosexuals to sing, and use women themselves for more masculine roles, you have to rely on cover singers from YouTube to find girls singing girly songs.
Naturally it should be sung by a girl, but they gave it to different infidelity-prone group instead -- homosexual Sam Smith. His tone is too whiny, making for a jarring mismatch between the juvenile emotional tone and the mature lyrics and sound. It sounds like a bratty little kid playing dress-up as an adult, typical of homosexual relationships.
Looking through YouTube covers of the song by female singers, you find too many that are juvenile in a different way -- from typical Millennials who have never had real emotional contact with other people, let alone in an intimate way. The result is artificial -- overly articulated enunciation, deadpan emotional tone, and just not being able to get in the right mood.
But there are a few decent clingy covers, all of them oddly enough from girls of Mediterranean background -- it must not be an unfamiliar mood for them to get into, of someone who gets cheated on and clings to their partner anyway. You couldn't hear a good cover coming from sexually non-dimorphic Scandinavia. The original version was written and performed by people of Celtic background, so it would be nice to hear a cover by another blue-eyed soul Celt like Adele.
Beginning with the best rendition I could find, here's Dua Lipa, of eastern Med background (Albanian):
Next is Mia Rose of western Med background (Portuguese):
A trip to the central Med (Italian) with Caterina Cropelli:
And finally an honorable mention to Luciana Zogbi (Lebanese Catholic), which is a little too rehearsed (child recital-like), rather than from the soul, but still not as obsessed with emo-diva melisma as the typical cover of the song is:
As the big music studios continue to give womanly songs to the homosexuals to sing, and use women themselves for more masculine roles, you have to rely on cover singers from YouTube to find girls singing girly songs.
January 2, 2018
Where is re-alignment, if cucks keep on cuckin'?
Post examples of the continued cuckservative hold over the GOP writ large (pols, pundits, social media mavens, etc.), to show that re-alignment of the party is not happening.
Or find some GOP Senator calling for heavy tariffs against cheap Chinese steel, or some Ben Shapiro clone calling for America to GTFO of Afghanistan already, or an RNC press release urging no amnesty for DACA unless we've already deported twice as many illegals who are already residing here, to provide counterpoints in favor of re-alignment. (We're waiting...).
Remember, re-alignment means the existing GOP is supposed to bend the knee to the populist-nationalist agenda. Not necessarily because they believe in that stuff -- they emphatically do not, but out of concern for which way the political winds are blowing. To the extent that the existing party and broader Conservative Movement (TM) keeps on with their same ol' bullshit, there is no re-alignment in progress.
Here's some dork on Twitter with over 100K followers (and over 1000 likes so far on this tweet), piggy-backing on an already ridiculous tweet by the guy who used to campaign by calling for an end to birthright citizenship, and using terms like "anchor baby" rather than PC euphemisms:
This is the kind of thing that Trump would re-tweet these days. He re-tweeted sycophant Charlie Cuck of Turning Point USA three times in a day recently, forgetting that these types -- including Breitbart -- were bitterly opposed to him during the primaries until it was all over. They were then, and sadly still remain, hypnotized followers of the Cruz Cuck Cult.
The only good thing to come of the Trump era in the broader culture is Tucker Carlson getting his own show in primetime on Fox. And guess who would never get an interview with Trump? He'd give it instead to another sycophant like the once-great Lou Dobbs or hostile forces whose validation he desires, like Maggie Haberman at the NYT.
Contrast with the shift in tone on the Democrats' side, where they are not constantly wailing about racism, sexism, and homophobia like they were just a year ago. Now they're talking about the class divide, Republican greed, using government to provide for the people's healthcare, and so on and so forth.
There are still SJW dead-enders, but unlike the zombie Right, the Left is not continuing to run 24/7 with the message of "Bake the cake, bigot" like it's still 2013. It's the Bernie wing that's been emboldened, unlike the business-as-usual wing that has been emboldened on the GOP side.
Whatever shake-up and excitement there is going to be in American politics, will be coming from the Democrat rather than Republican party.
Or find some GOP Senator calling for heavy tariffs against cheap Chinese steel, or some Ben Shapiro clone calling for America to GTFO of Afghanistan already, or an RNC press release urging no amnesty for DACA unless we've already deported twice as many illegals who are already residing here, to provide counterpoints in favor of re-alignment. (We're waiting...).
Remember, re-alignment means the existing GOP is supposed to bend the knee to the populist-nationalist agenda. Not necessarily because they believe in that stuff -- they emphatically do not, but out of concern for which way the political winds are blowing. To the extent that the existing party and broader Conservative Movement (TM) keeps on with their same ol' bullshit, there is no re-alignment in progress.
Here's some dork on Twitter with over 100K followers (and over 1000 likes so far on this tweet), piggy-backing on an already ridiculous tweet by the guy who used to campaign by calling for an end to birthright citizenship, and using terms like "anchor baby" rather than PC euphemisms:
President Trump just gave Hispanics a MASSIVE tax cut! They will be voting for Republicans like never before this year— Jacob Wohl (@JacobAWohl) January 2, 2018
This is the kind of thing that Trump would re-tweet these days. He re-tweeted sycophant Charlie Cuck of Turning Point USA three times in a day recently, forgetting that these types -- including Breitbart -- were bitterly opposed to him during the primaries until it was all over. They were then, and sadly still remain, hypnotized followers of the Cruz Cuck Cult.
The only good thing to come of the Trump era in the broader culture is Tucker Carlson getting his own show in primetime on Fox. And guess who would never get an interview with Trump? He'd give it instead to another sycophant like the once-great Lou Dobbs or hostile forces whose validation he desires, like Maggie Haberman at the NYT.
Contrast with the shift in tone on the Democrats' side, where they are not constantly wailing about racism, sexism, and homophobia like they were just a year ago. Now they're talking about the class divide, Republican greed, using government to provide for the people's healthcare, and so on and so forth.
There are still SJW dead-enders, but unlike the zombie Right, the Left is not continuing to run 24/7 with the message of "Bake the cake, bigot" like it's still 2013. It's the Bernie wing that's been emboldened, unlike the business-as-usual wing that has been emboldened on the GOP side.
Whatever shake-up and excitement there is going to be in American politics, will be coming from the Democrat rather than Republican party.
December 31, 2017
"New Right" now fully co-opted by neo-cons, with remarks on Iran protests
The failed re-alignment of the GOP has been clear for awhile in the direction of the Trump movement trying to pull GOP-ers toward them, as the Republican party remains exactly as it was before the attempted "hostile takeover" by the Trump supporters.
But now we're seeing an even greater failure in the other direction -- former supporters of the populist-nationalist movement who are now shilling for the corporatist-globalist agenda of the widely hated GOP. If the Establishment cannot drive out insurgents from the political arena, it seeks to co-opt them instead.
They're known as the "New Right" or "Alt-Lite". Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, Stefan Molyneux, Paul Joseph Watson, Cassandra Fairbanks, et al. Mostly active on Twitter, although some do guest host segments on the Infowars shows.
They all began as sincere America-firsters, and all expressed shock and disappointment when the Pentagon over-ruled Trump and decided to bomb Syria, which was obviously not going to be a one-off incident but a prelude to a broader and protracted intervention in that country, completely the opposite of what Trump had campaigned on and exhorted Obama to do in 2013.
Regime change in foreign countries was not supposed to be on the list of priorities for Making America Great Again. With the sudden shift on Syria policy, the US was now committed to regime change against Assad, which remains the open official policy still.
We now have thousands of American troops over there, and General Mattis of the Pentagon junta has declared that we will stay there forever -- no conditions, no timelines, and explicitly not just because ISIS has been defeated.
In the scramble to figure out what was going on, these Alt-Lite figures were all on the non-interventionist side and figured that someone else was pulling the strings on military policy other than the Commander-in-chief. They certainly did not start out as neo-cons.
Cernovich developed the largest networks of inside sources, and laid it all out -- General McMaster, also of the Pentagon junta, was undoing the early transformation that General Flynn (purged by the junta) was bringing to the National Security Council. Flynn was on board with Trump about shutting the door on Cold War policies, and focusing instead on radical Islam.
That meant letting go of regime change in Syria, which was a relic of the Cold War, and which would harm the fight against radical Islam, since Assad's secular pluralist government is a target of the jihadists, making him an ally of ours. For that matter, Iran is a target of the jihadists, who blew up the Iranian parliament just last summer. All jihadists are Sunni (though not the other way around), and Iran is predominantly Shia and pluralist.
One by one, Flynn's people were purged from the government by the brass at the Pentagon and the intel agencies. This culminated in August when Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka were purged, followed by Trump giving a neo-con ventriloquist speech about the existential need for us to send more troops back into Afghanistan. By September, the neo-con purge of Trumpians had been completed.
This left the Alt-Lite people with no more contacts within the government who were friendly to their movement. Now there were only GOP puppets for corporate elitism in economics and imperialist globalism against the usual targets in foreign policy. If the Alt-Lite journalists and activists wanted any access to the Trump administration, they would now be dealing only with hostile forces.
That meant that either they could stick to their principles of America First, and get shut out from all access to the Trump administration -- or grovel before their enemies who had taken over the administration, and get some access.
Groveling isn't enough, though -- the cucks and neo-cons who run the GOP want you to spread their BS message to your large audience, reaching people who the standard GOP talking heads could not reach via Fox News.
The deal is pretty simple: you can do the whole Tea Party thing, being counter-cultural or insurgent against the GOP Establishment, and adapt it for younger online-only audiences. The Tea Party was easily co-opted, so make that the model for the New Right. The Tea Party, only with no Bible thumping or other Boomer-related gimmicks.
But, you are never to criticize major policy decisions -- especially relating to the main faction that controls the party, the Pentagon -- and you are never to criticize the operation of the White House at the upper levels. Be a good team player for the GOP.
In addition to needing sources, there's also the chance that some Zionist donor dangled a bag of money in front of them.
Over the past several months, the New Right has started to sound more and more like the Old Right. Dismissing single-payer healthcare when they might have considered it before, cheerleading the tax cuts for the wealthy and for off-shoring corporations, hyping up Israel as the most important place for Americans to concern themselves with, and laying off their earlier criticism of the Pentagon junta for how it was sealing off Trump from his allies and from any information that might lead him to decide against more imperialism, with Cernovich even giving empty pro forma praise for both McMaster and Kelly.
Some of these changes may have been symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome, where after joining politics as nominal Republicans -- Trumpians -- they began internalizing the standard Republican crap that they had been fighting against just a year ago.
But in their reaction to the current protests in Iran, they seem far more coordinated and centrally orchestrated, using the same talking points and even the same buzzwords ("brave," "heroic"). Some of these talking points cut completely against their brands as they have existed for the past year or more -- like how we need regime change in Iran so that women can cast off their hijabs, and that "this is what real feminism looks like". All of these New Right people are anti-feminist, so what gives?
Clearly this talking point came from the same neo-con think tank borg brain, which tries to persuade American audiences to destabilize another Middle Eastern country and send millions of more Muslim refugees to our shores, by appealing to human rights, feminism, etc. The disseminater of this liberal interventionist talking point did not bother to adapt it to the anti-feminist brand of the New Right figures, leaving its fat clumsy neo-con fingerprints all over the message.
Do the head-level neo-cons really think we're going to forget how these Alt-Lite people responded to the push for regime change in Syria, either during the campaign or right after the bombing of Syria? Some of them went so far as to say they were "done with Trump" after that (misplacing the blame that belongs 100% to the Pentagon and intel agencies).
We're not the typical mindless Republican-voting morons who will rally around whatever a Republican President says we must do. If that's the only people who resonate with this neo-con co-optation of the New Right media figures, then it's not persuading anyone new among their audience. Those of us who used to tune in to Cernovich's scoops about which Trump supporter was getting purged next, can easily detect when he's talking like a ventriloquist dummy with a neo-con hand up its butt.
We can also tell when the dog does not bark. Back when the purge was in full force, Cernovich attacked the anti-Trump staffer Johnnie DeStefano as one of the ringleaders. Well, now Axios reports that DeStefano will assume even greater powers in the new year, meaning there will be even less of a Trumpian influence among the White House staff, and less Trumpian influence over Congress.
Why isn't Cernovich using the occasion to gloat about how he knew the score months ago, and was way ahead of the mainstream media in identifying who this anti-Trump purger was? He loves to gloat about early stories he's broken, but now not if it would end up criticizing the operation of the White House.
As the Pentagon and CIA begin preparing for the War on Terror 2.0 against Iran, who has never attacked us, while giving hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia who blew us up on 9/11, the New Right is only going to get worse. It's going to be warmed-over "Axis of Evil" crap from the George W. Bush years. Just when you thought the neo-cons were dead -- a hand shoots out of the grave and clings to your ankle!
The only high-profile Trumpians I can identify who are skeptical or dismissive of mindless, wasteful, and pointless regime change in Iran are Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter. The only one with a lower profile but still visible in conservative media, is Scott Greer with the Daily Caller (connection to Tucker).
Paul Joseph Watson actually tweeted a link to this post by Moon of Alabama, which makes the case that whatever economic grievances may have motivated some of the Iranian protesters, the Deep State in the US and Israel is not going to waste the opportunity to re-direct them into a full-on regime change operation, which will fail like all the others have.
But then someone must have tapped him on the shoulder, and whispered in his ear that he was supposed to be towing the line about how great it would be for regime change to strike Iran. He also parroted the groupthink talking point from the others in the New Right that these protests could not possibly be part of a Deep State coup, since the mainstream media are not covering them like they covered them during the Arab Spring or Syrian civil war.
It is a facile claim, as the media will soon be covering them, but are not yet clear about how to frame their narrative -- this time, the media's rival party is in power, unlike during 2009 and just after, when their own party was in power and could not be criticized.
Moreover, in between the Arab Spring and the potential Persian Spring, the media's party struck a major deal with Iran when their own party was in power. Encouraging regime change in Iran would certainly disrupt that deal, which they consider one of their party's crowning achievements (rightly so, although you could say it was one of the few things they did that didn't fuck up the world any more than it already was).
Remember: the whole point of the Iran Nuclear Deal was to open the country up to Western investment, which would benefit the finance sector here in America. Since the finance sector is the main faction controlling the Democrat party, it had to be that party that struck the deal. The military is the main faction controlling the GOP, and they treat Iran as an obstacle to their continued military footprint in the Middle East. So like hell the deal would be struck by them.
With the media joining the finance sector in the party system, they are going to now err on the side of not stirring up trouble against Iran. Any regime change or other military operation would threaten the fragile new state of investment by Western banks in that country, which they were so hungry to sink their teeth into that they risked looking "soft on a regional military opponent". They countered by tying Western investment to a moratorium on nuclear weapons development.
So the media wants to have Wall Street's back on not destabilizing Iran.
On the other hand, the media also wants access to sources from the military in case a regime change operation does get under way, so they may decide to let Wall Street's investments in Iran go to pot by spreading the Pentagon and CIA's propaganda about needing to overthrow the government there once again.
For the moment, the media's decision is up in the air. But it does not mean that we are not witnessing an obvious attempt by the opportunistic Deep State to turn protests about economic grievance into a full-on regime change and nation-building operation, destined to fail like all the others before it.
But now we're seeing an even greater failure in the other direction -- former supporters of the populist-nationalist movement who are now shilling for the corporatist-globalist agenda of the widely hated GOP. If the Establishment cannot drive out insurgents from the political arena, it seeks to co-opt them instead.
They're known as the "New Right" or "Alt-Lite". Mike Cernovich, Jack Posobiec, Stefan Molyneux, Paul Joseph Watson, Cassandra Fairbanks, et al. Mostly active on Twitter, although some do guest host segments on the Infowars shows.
They all began as sincere America-firsters, and all expressed shock and disappointment when the Pentagon over-ruled Trump and decided to bomb Syria, which was obviously not going to be a one-off incident but a prelude to a broader and protracted intervention in that country, completely the opposite of what Trump had campaigned on and exhorted Obama to do in 2013.
Regime change in foreign countries was not supposed to be on the list of priorities for Making America Great Again. With the sudden shift on Syria policy, the US was now committed to regime change against Assad, which remains the open official policy still.
We now have thousands of American troops over there, and General Mattis of the Pentagon junta has declared that we will stay there forever -- no conditions, no timelines, and explicitly not just because ISIS has been defeated.
In the scramble to figure out what was going on, these Alt-Lite figures were all on the non-interventionist side and figured that someone else was pulling the strings on military policy other than the Commander-in-chief. They certainly did not start out as neo-cons.
Cernovich developed the largest networks of inside sources, and laid it all out -- General McMaster, also of the Pentagon junta, was undoing the early transformation that General Flynn (purged by the junta) was bringing to the National Security Council. Flynn was on board with Trump about shutting the door on Cold War policies, and focusing instead on radical Islam.
That meant letting go of regime change in Syria, which was a relic of the Cold War, and which would harm the fight against radical Islam, since Assad's secular pluralist government is a target of the jihadists, making him an ally of ours. For that matter, Iran is a target of the jihadists, who blew up the Iranian parliament just last summer. All jihadists are Sunni (though not the other way around), and Iran is predominantly Shia and pluralist.
One by one, Flynn's people were purged from the government by the brass at the Pentagon and the intel agencies. This culminated in August when Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka were purged, followed by Trump giving a neo-con ventriloquist speech about the existential need for us to send more troops back into Afghanistan. By September, the neo-con purge of Trumpians had been completed.
This left the Alt-Lite people with no more contacts within the government who were friendly to their movement. Now there were only GOP puppets for corporate elitism in economics and imperialist globalism against the usual targets in foreign policy. If the Alt-Lite journalists and activists wanted any access to the Trump administration, they would now be dealing only with hostile forces.
That meant that either they could stick to their principles of America First, and get shut out from all access to the Trump administration -- or grovel before their enemies who had taken over the administration, and get some access.
Groveling isn't enough, though -- the cucks and neo-cons who run the GOP want you to spread their BS message to your large audience, reaching people who the standard GOP talking heads could not reach via Fox News.
The deal is pretty simple: you can do the whole Tea Party thing, being counter-cultural or insurgent against the GOP Establishment, and adapt it for younger online-only audiences. The Tea Party was easily co-opted, so make that the model for the New Right. The Tea Party, only with no Bible thumping or other Boomer-related gimmicks.
But, you are never to criticize major policy decisions -- especially relating to the main faction that controls the party, the Pentagon -- and you are never to criticize the operation of the White House at the upper levels. Be a good team player for the GOP.
In addition to needing sources, there's also the chance that some Zionist donor dangled a bag of money in front of them.
Over the past several months, the New Right has started to sound more and more like the Old Right. Dismissing single-payer healthcare when they might have considered it before, cheerleading the tax cuts for the wealthy and for off-shoring corporations, hyping up Israel as the most important place for Americans to concern themselves with, and laying off their earlier criticism of the Pentagon junta for how it was sealing off Trump from his allies and from any information that might lead him to decide against more imperialism, with Cernovich even giving empty pro forma praise for both McMaster and Kelly.
Some of these changes may have been symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome, where after joining politics as nominal Republicans -- Trumpians -- they began internalizing the standard Republican crap that they had been fighting against just a year ago.
But in their reaction to the current protests in Iran, they seem far more coordinated and centrally orchestrated, using the same talking points and even the same buzzwords ("brave," "heroic"). Some of these talking points cut completely against their brands as they have existed for the past year or more -- like how we need regime change in Iran so that women can cast off their hijabs, and that "this is what real feminism looks like". All of these New Right people are anti-feminist, so what gives?
Clearly this talking point came from the same neo-con think tank borg brain, which tries to persuade American audiences to destabilize another Middle Eastern country and send millions of more Muslim refugees to our shores, by appealing to human rights, feminism, etc. The disseminater of this liberal interventionist talking point did not bother to adapt it to the anti-feminist brand of the New Right figures, leaving its fat clumsy neo-con fingerprints all over the message.
Do the head-level neo-cons really think we're going to forget how these Alt-Lite people responded to the push for regime change in Syria, either during the campaign or right after the bombing of Syria? Some of them went so far as to say they were "done with Trump" after that (misplacing the blame that belongs 100% to the Pentagon and intel agencies).
We're not the typical mindless Republican-voting morons who will rally around whatever a Republican President says we must do. If that's the only people who resonate with this neo-con co-optation of the New Right media figures, then it's not persuading anyone new among their audience. Those of us who used to tune in to Cernovich's scoops about which Trump supporter was getting purged next, can easily detect when he's talking like a ventriloquist dummy with a neo-con hand up its butt.
We can also tell when the dog does not bark. Back when the purge was in full force, Cernovich attacked the anti-Trump staffer Johnnie DeStefano as one of the ringleaders. Well, now Axios reports that DeStefano will assume even greater powers in the new year, meaning there will be even less of a Trumpian influence among the White House staff, and less Trumpian influence over Congress.
Why isn't Cernovich using the occasion to gloat about how he knew the score months ago, and was way ahead of the mainstream media in identifying who this anti-Trump purger was? He loves to gloat about early stories he's broken, but now not if it would end up criticizing the operation of the White House.
As the Pentagon and CIA begin preparing for the War on Terror 2.0 against Iran, who has never attacked us, while giving hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia who blew us up on 9/11, the New Right is only going to get worse. It's going to be warmed-over "Axis of Evil" crap from the George W. Bush years. Just when you thought the neo-cons were dead -- a hand shoots out of the grave and clings to your ankle!
The only high-profile Trumpians I can identify who are skeptical or dismissive of mindless, wasteful, and pointless regime change in Iran are Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter. The only one with a lower profile but still visible in conservative media, is Scott Greer with the Daily Caller (connection to Tucker).
Paul Joseph Watson actually tweeted a link to this post by Moon of Alabama, which makes the case that whatever economic grievances may have motivated some of the Iranian protesters, the Deep State in the US and Israel is not going to waste the opportunity to re-direct them into a full-on regime change operation, which will fail like all the others have.
But then someone must have tapped him on the shoulder, and whispered in his ear that he was supposed to be towing the line about how great it would be for regime change to strike Iran. He also parroted the groupthink talking point from the others in the New Right that these protests could not possibly be part of a Deep State coup, since the mainstream media are not covering them like they covered them during the Arab Spring or Syrian civil war.
It is a facile claim, as the media will soon be covering them, but are not yet clear about how to frame their narrative -- this time, the media's rival party is in power, unlike during 2009 and just after, when their own party was in power and could not be criticized.
Moreover, in between the Arab Spring and the potential Persian Spring, the media's party struck a major deal with Iran when their own party was in power. Encouraging regime change in Iran would certainly disrupt that deal, which they consider one of their party's crowning achievements (rightly so, although you could say it was one of the few things they did that didn't fuck up the world any more than it already was).
Remember: the whole point of the Iran Nuclear Deal was to open the country up to Western investment, which would benefit the finance sector here in America. Since the finance sector is the main faction controlling the Democrat party, it had to be that party that struck the deal. The military is the main faction controlling the GOP, and they treat Iran as an obstacle to their continued military footprint in the Middle East. So like hell the deal would be struck by them.
With the media joining the finance sector in the party system, they are going to now err on the side of not stirring up trouble against Iran. Any regime change or other military operation would threaten the fragile new state of investment by Western banks in that country, which they were so hungry to sink their teeth into that they risked looking "soft on a regional military opponent". They countered by tying Western investment to a moratorium on nuclear weapons development.
So the media wants to have Wall Street's back on not destabilizing Iran.
On the other hand, the media also wants access to sources from the military in case a regime change operation does get under way, so they may decide to let Wall Street's investments in Iran go to pot by spreading the Pentagon and CIA's propaganda about needing to overthrow the government there once again.
For the moment, the media's decision is up in the air. But it does not mean that we are not witnessing an obvious attempt by the opportunistic Deep State to turn protests about economic grievance into a full-on regime change and nation-building operation, destined to fail like all the others before it.
December 27, 2017
Foreign steel flooding in more under GOP govt: No signs of re-alignment
We've already seen that trade deficits are widening under total GOP rule, contra the campaign goals that won the White House for the not-very-Republican candidate Trump. Now comes news that for one key industry in particular, steel, the situation has gotten dramatically worse.
For the first 10 months of the Trump presidency, steel imports have shot up nearly 20% compared to the same period of 2016. So much for wanting to keep Pennsylvania steelworkers in the coalition.
As with widening trade deficits, expanding military missions and footprints, and an immigration plan to amnesty the DACA people in exchange for "border security" instead of a solid wall and mass deportations, the clobbering of the steel industry shows that we should start using quote marks when describing the "Trump" presidency.
It is exactly what you'd expect from any other generic Republican administration that had control of Congress to boot. Trump is only one man with almost no supporters in the government or in the elite sectors of the economy. We sent him as our negotiator, but they refuse to compromise with our demands.
Without any leverage in DC itself, we his supporters are his only leverage. But he has decided not to whip us up into a collective action as he did when he held rallies to get out the vote and defeat the crooks and traitors at the ballot box.
And in the over six months since I first made that observation, his popularity and support has continued to fall among independents and other non-traditional Republicans. By now, there are a handful of Trump die-hards who would still show up and wage battle if he were to lead them, but it's mostly the same ol' Republican base who are most enthusiastic at this Ted Cruz type presidency.
He could get some help from across the aisle, but he does not call the shots like an emperor, and does not control the overall agenda or who will be part of the deal. That is decided by the elite factions that control the GOP.
The uphill battle within "their own" party that Trump and Commerce Secretary Ross are fighting against steel imports will be taken up in another post, as that gets into the more general discussion of which economic sectors control the Dems vs. the GOP, and what their motives are when in control of the government.
For now, just consider how ridiculous it is for the "populist re-alignment" theory that it's a Democrat Senator sticking his neck out for Trump on steel imports, when his party is possessed by such a hysterical witch hunt against the President. Let's list all those Republican Senators who have altered their policies to match the Trump movement and called for stiff tariffs on foreign steel...
And even if we had a few, that would not be different from the George W. Bush administration, who did manage to implement a tariff on steel for a brief moment in 2002-'03 before it bent the knee to the World Trade Organization and called it off.
If this administration does no better than the George W. Bush presidency on steel tariffs, that will be the end of re-alignment discussion for this term at least.
For the first 10 months of the Trump presidency, steel imports have shot up nearly 20% compared to the same period of 2016. So much for wanting to keep Pennsylvania steelworkers in the coalition.
As with widening trade deficits, expanding military missions and footprints, and an immigration plan to amnesty the DACA people in exchange for "border security" instead of a solid wall and mass deportations, the clobbering of the steel industry shows that we should start using quote marks when describing the "Trump" presidency.
It is exactly what you'd expect from any other generic Republican administration that had control of Congress to boot. Trump is only one man with almost no supporters in the government or in the elite sectors of the economy. We sent him as our negotiator, but they refuse to compromise with our demands.
Without any leverage in DC itself, we his supporters are his only leverage. But he has decided not to whip us up into a collective action as he did when he held rallies to get out the vote and defeat the crooks and traitors at the ballot box.
And in the over six months since I first made that observation, his popularity and support has continued to fall among independents and other non-traditional Republicans. By now, there are a handful of Trump die-hards who would still show up and wage battle if he were to lead them, but it's mostly the same ol' Republican base who are most enthusiastic at this Ted Cruz type presidency.
He could get some help from across the aisle, but he does not call the shots like an emperor, and does not control the overall agenda or who will be part of the deal. That is decided by the elite factions that control the GOP.
“I think the White House is immobilized, because they have such a cacophony of voices,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio who describes himself as an ally of the president on trade. “This administration doesn’t seem to know what it thinks about trade.”
The uphill battle within "their own" party that Trump and Commerce Secretary Ross are fighting against steel imports will be taken up in another post, as that gets into the more general discussion of which economic sectors control the Dems vs. the GOP, and what their motives are when in control of the government.
For now, just consider how ridiculous it is for the "populist re-alignment" theory that it's a Democrat Senator sticking his neck out for Trump on steel imports, when his party is possessed by such a hysterical witch hunt against the President. Let's list all those Republican Senators who have altered their policies to match the Trump movement and called for stiff tariffs on foreign steel...
And even if we had a few, that would not be different from the George W. Bush administration, who did manage to implement a tariff on steel for a brief moment in 2002-'03 before it bent the knee to the World Trade Organization and called it off.
If this administration does no better than the George W. Bush presidency on steel tariffs, that will be the end of re-alignment discussion for this term at least.
December 25, 2017
When must-have toys were Made in USA, and built to last
Another Christmas, another Star Wars movie, another attempt to cash in on the hype with toy lines just as the little kiddies are drawing up their lists for Santa Claus.
By churning out new Star Wars movies every year, they are making them less unique and distinct as cultural events. And the same goes for these toy lines. Kids won't get excited about them, as they become habituated to them, and will not have other novel toy lines to turn to, since everything is about Star Wars now.
Back when Star Wars first came out, it was a self-contained phenomenon rather than a continually practiced religion -- it was not going to be re-enacted from now until the end of the universe. It made the toys a phenomenon in themselves, rather than the same old predictable crap from last year but slightly updated. You had to get in on the Star Wars toy craze, because it would not last forever, and next year or the year after that, it would be something else.
If you Google Image Search "Christmas 1983," a majority of the results show Star Wars toys. When my family gets together for Christmas, we sometimes watch old home movies, and there's one from Christmas '83 where I'm so entranced by the Star Wars toys that I don't show much appreciation for the other gifts under the tree. It was the thing to get.
A lot of those toys literally still hold up today, since they were made before manufacturing standards went down the tubes as American companies started off-shoring these jobs to places where labor is cheap and doesn't give a shit about quality results.
They were not made to high standards because they believed Star Wars would become an enduring brand, and that the merchandise needed to be collectible in quality to last as long as the brand's appeal lasted. They simply didn't want to sell their customers a bunch of cheap junk at high prices.
Not everything from the heyday of children's toys during the 1980s was made in USA, though. No matter which brand, the ubiquitous action figures were mostly made outside the country (Mexico, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). These toys do not require much assembly, and the process of pouring plastic into the molds for the arms, legs, torsos, and heads can be overseen by careless Chinese or Mexican laborers.
The 1980s did see the beginning of the off-shoring of manufacturing, but it began with cheaper things that customers might not care about so much being made in China. Such as action figures, compared to other kinds of toys.
The vehicles and playsets, however, were still being made right here in America. Things that require a decent level of assembly -- putting a bunch of heterogeneous components into a single finished whole product -- were too much to be trusted to Chinese sweatshop labor back then. You needed more attentive and well-paid American workers to put complicated things together.
It's the same reason that major devices were still being made here, like automobiles, washing machines, and television sets, while less complicated products were undergoing rapid off-shoring, like textiles and clothing.
Even if the parent had to put the pieces together for their kid's toy ("some assembly required"), the quality of the components was too high to be done overseas. The plastic used for action figures does feel cheaper and more rubbery, but the stuff used for vehicles and playsets is more durable and has finer details. Anything that required precision had to be done here.
The three major toy makers were Mattel, with factories in southern California, who made He-Man and Secret Wars; Hasbro, manufacturing out of Rhode Island, who made G.I. Joe; and Kenner, whose main factory was in Cincinnati, Ohio, who made Star Wars. Other companies who made toys here in America include Coleco, Tyco, Remco, and Tonka.
When they closed up most of their factories is hard to determine, but from old news articles it seems like the late 1980s through the early 2000s saw the sustained shuttering of American toy-making plants. The companies and brands still exist in America, just not the actual production that sustained working and middle-class families and their communities.
Once American companies had off-shored the cheaper products, they began off-shoring the more complicated ones as well. No washing machines or televisions are made here anymore, and it's lucky that cars and airplanes are so complicated to make -- they're one of the few things we still feel are too complex to trust to cheap foreigners.
So it goes with toys, as the vehicles and playsets have joined the action figures in all being made in cheap-labor countries, with cheap materials, and shoddy assembly. No one thinks that today's Star Wars toys are going to physically endure as long as the ones made 35 to 40 years ago.
And yet mergers and acquisitions, together with off-shoring production, have made these companies more profitable than during their heyday as makers of cultural phenomena (no one cares about new Star Wars toys).
They should not be rewarded with skyrocketing profits after destroying their American workforces and offering customers more and more forgettable products of lower and lower quality. Time for those 35% tariffs on off-shored production, maybe combined with some direct federal subsidies for American toy manufacturing.
While sociopathic corporations deserve nothing more than a load of coal in their stocking, let's not end on such a "Bah humbug" note, and let memories of the not-so-distant past remind us that a better world is possible. If we were doing better then, we can do it again in the future -- it's not a hypothetical experiment.
Working and middle-class kids got to enjoy quality-made toys, and the still largely manufacturing oriented economy allowed the toys' assembly-line workers to earn enough to give nice things to their own children for Christmas.
Click to view larger image; right-click the pop-up image to view the full-sized image.
I was lucky enough to own an AT-AT as a kid. It seemed so much more real because of how well put-together it was -- not just some cheap little "toy". Although scaled down, it seemed like a real vehicle that had rolled off of a real assembly line at a real factory.
I still have a few old Star Wars toys, and the motivation for this post came when I checked the country of origin on Jabba the Hutt out of curiosity. His little pet is made in Hong Kong, but I couldn't believe the dungeon / throne and Jabba himself are made in USA.
Another of those old home movies shows me playing with the Snake Mountain set from He-Man. It has a microphone and speaker with a "scary voice" effect built in (some distortion, echo, lower pitch). I didn't notice until looking at the ad just now, but the painting detail on the He-Man playsets is something you wouldn't see done today -- too much skill to use an airbrush, or whatever it was.
The most impressive toy I ever got was the Defiant space station from G.I. Joe. It really is as big, complicated, and slickly made as it looks in the ad. My father and uncle had to spend most of the afternoon putting it together. I couldn't ask for hardly anything else that Christmas, but I didn't mind -- it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.
Now that the Millennials are old enough to go through nostalgia, it's notable how little they care about the toys of their childhood to the same degree that Gen X-ers remember their toys from the '80s. Much of that must have to do with how fast the quality level dropped off during the '90s. There was no American-made Ewok Village, Snake Mountain, or Defiant space station to captivate them. Just cheaply made disposable crap from China.
Once we restore manufacturing to the American economy, kids will appreciate the things of their childhoods again.
By churning out new Star Wars movies every year, they are making them less unique and distinct as cultural events. And the same goes for these toy lines. Kids won't get excited about them, as they become habituated to them, and will not have other novel toy lines to turn to, since everything is about Star Wars now.
Back when Star Wars first came out, it was a self-contained phenomenon rather than a continually practiced religion -- it was not going to be re-enacted from now until the end of the universe. It made the toys a phenomenon in themselves, rather than the same old predictable crap from last year but slightly updated. You had to get in on the Star Wars toy craze, because it would not last forever, and next year or the year after that, it would be something else.
If you Google Image Search "Christmas 1983," a majority of the results show Star Wars toys. When my family gets together for Christmas, we sometimes watch old home movies, and there's one from Christmas '83 where I'm so entranced by the Star Wars toys that I don't show much appreciation for the other gifts under the tree. It was the thing to get.
A lot of those toys literally still hold up today, since they were made before manufacturing standards went down the tubes as American companies started off-shoring these jobs to places where labor is cheap and doesn't give a shit about quality results.
They were not made to high standards because they believed Star Wars would become an enduring brand, and that the merchandise needed to be collectible in quality to last as long as the brand's appeal lasted. They simply didn't want to sell their customers a bunch of cheap junk at high prices.
Not everything from the heyday of children's toys during the 1980s was made in USA, though. No matter which brand, the ubiquitous action figures were mostly made outside the country (Mexico, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). These toys do not require much assembly, and the process of pouring plastic into the molds for the arms, legs, torsos, and heads can be overseen by careless Chinese or Mexican laborers.
The 1980s did see the beginning of the off-shoring of manufacturing, but it began with cheaper things that customers might not care about so much being made in China. Such as action figures, compared to other kinds of toys.
The vehicles and playsets, however, were still being made right here in America. Things that require a decent level of assembly -- putting a bunch of heterogeneous components into a single finished whole product -- were too much to be trusted to Chinese sweatshop labor back then. You needed more attentive and well-paid American workers to put complicated things together.
It's the same reason that major devices were still being made here, like automobiles, washing machines, and television sets, while less complicated products were undergoing rapid off-shoring, like textiles and clothing.
Even if the parent had to put the pieces together for their kid's toy ("some assembly required"), the quality of the components was too high to be done overseas. The plastic used for action figures does feel cheaper and more rubbery, but the stuff used for vehicles and playsets is more durable and has finer details. Anything that required precision had to be done here.
The three major toy makers were Mattel, with factories in southern California, who made He-Man and Secret Wars; Hasbro, manufacturing out of Rhode Island, who made G.I. Joe; and Kenner, whose main factory was in Cincinnati, Ohio, who made Star Wars. Other companies who made toys here in America include Coleco, Tyco, Remco, and Tonka.
When they closed up most of their factories is hard to determine, but from old news articles it seems like the late 1980s through the early 2000s saw the sustained shuttering of American toy-making plants. The companies and brands still exist in America, just not the actual production that sustained working and middle-class families and their communities.
Once American companies had off-shored the cheaper products, they began off-shoring the more complicated ones as well. No washing machines or televisions are made here anymore, and it's lucky that cars and airplanes are so complicated to make -- they're one of the few things we still feel are too complex to trust to cheap foreigners.
So it goes with toys, as the vehicles and playsets have joined the action figures in all being made in cheap-labor countries, with cheap materials, and shoddy assembly. No one thinks that today's Star Wars toys are going to physically endure as long as the ones made 35 to 40 years ago.
And yet mergers and acquisitions, together with off-shoring production, have made these companies more profitable than during their heyday as makers of cultural phenomena (no one cares about new Star Wars toys).
They should not be rewarded with skyrocketing profits after destroying their American workforces and offering customers more and more forgettable products of lower and lower quality. Time for those 35% tariffs on off-shored production, maybe combined with some direct federal subsidies for American toy manufacturing.
While sociopathic corporations deserve nothing more than a load of coal in their stocking, let's not end on such a "Bah humbug" note, and let memories of the not-so-distant past remind us that a better world is possible. If we were doing better then, we can do it again in the future -- it's not a hypothetical experiment.
Working and middle-class kids got to enjoy quality-made toys, and the still largely manufacturing oriented economy allowed the toys' assembly-line workers to earn enough to give nice things to their own children for Christmas.
Click to view larger image; right-click the pop-up image to view the full-sized image.
I was lucky enough to own an AT-AT as a kid. It seemed so much more real because of how well put-together it was -- not just some cheap little "toy". Although scaled down, it seemed like a real vehicle that had rolled off of a real assembly line at a real factory.
I still have a few old Star Wars toys, and the motivation for this post came when I checked the country of origin on Jabba the Hutt out of curiosity. His little pet is made in Hong Kong, but I couldn't believe the dungeon / throne and Jabba himself are made in USA.
Another of those old home movies shows me playing with the Snake Mountain set from He-Man. It has a microphone and speaker with a "scary voice" effect built in (some distortion, echo, lower pitch). I didn't notice until looking at the ad just now, but the painting detail on the He-Man playsets is something you wouldn't see done today -- too much skill to use an airbrush, or whatever it was.
The most impressive toy I ever got was the Defiant space station from G.I. Joe. It really is as big, complicated, and slickly made as it looks in the ad. My father and uncle had to spend most of the afternoon putting it together. I couldn't ask for hardly anything else that Christmas, but I didn't mind -- it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.
Now that the Millennials are old enough to go through nostalgia, it's notable how little they care about the toys of their childhood to the same degree that Gen X-ers remember their toys from the '80s. Much of that must have to do with how fast the quality level dropped off during the '90s. There was no American-made Ewok Village, Snake Mountain, or Defiant space station to captivate them. Just cheaply made disposable crap from China.
Once we restore manufacturing to the American economy, kids will appreciate the things of their childhoods again.
December 20, 2017
After GOP tax cuts, Dems at Fed poised to pop stock bubble and tank Trump
I warned about this back in June, after hearing warnings from Nassim Taleb and Peter Schiff, while adding insights from my analysis of the Dems vs. GOP battle being between the Wall Street party and the Pentagon party.
The signs that the stock market is a bubble are only clearer six months later -- a record number of record numbers, as we close out the year. Number of days with record-high closings, number of months of stock market growth (all 12), absolute level of the peaks (now 25,000), probably a record in the percent growth in a single year (about 25%), etc.
That is the subjective speculation about what the value is of these companies, largely driven by internet and tech companies. The objective reality is that so many still don't earn anything, and the valuations compared to their sales is at a record high (outta-whack).
There has been no observable revolution in our economy -- we would see it, and feel it, like the Industrial Revolution planting factories all over the landscape, and newfound wealth pouring into our households as we left behind poor-paying agriculture. The holdovers from the real economy are being shuttered and swept aside also at a record pace, especially retail.
But trade deficits are growing at a rate and to a level they haven't seen since before the Great Recession -- another sign that the real economy, like manufacturing, is being even more vigorously shipped out of our country and into China, Mexico, Vietnam, etc., while we are left with servant jobs at Starbucks and imaginary wealth from tech start-ups (for the few who even land a job in that sector).
Debt, even compared to GDP, is still rising -- and may go back to skyrocketing after the $1 trillion tax cut, War on Terror 2.0 against Iran, etc.
All of this phony activity is being fueled by cheap money, driven by low interest rates that make borrowing easy, particularly for large entities.
At some point, the Federal Reserve, which sets these interest rates, has to deliver a day of reckoning -- but not when their own party is in the White House! That's the big piece of the puzzle that observers like Schiff missed during the Great Recession: the finance sector controls the Democrat party, so like hell they're going to pop a bubble when a Democrat is President.
But now that their rival party is in power -- indeed, in control of the entire government -- the finance sector can deliver the day of reckoning, when it can pin the blame on the other side of the great big struggle between elite factions.
Here is a graph showing interest rates, along with recessions in shaded columns. Notice how a spike in interest rates precedes a recession:
There is one major exception, when they raised rates in 1994 without triggering a recession. That's because the growth in debt (to GDP) had plateaued and even declined starting in 1993:
A spike in interest rates is the spark, and soaring debt is the gas. Since the major economic players were not projecting soaring debt during the mid-1990s, the spike in interest rates did not set off a cascade of bankruptcies or threats to bring down the whole economy unless they were bailed out.
And notice who was President then -- a Democrat! Generally, debt has been growing since around 1980, and every time the Fed has raised interest rates and then triggered a recession, it has been under Republican Presidents. They held rates comically low, around 0, for all 8 years of Obama. But once Trump got elected, they raised it for the first time in a long while, and have raised it three more times this year. They're clearly on track to jack them up even more next year.
What will be their rationale for raising interest rates to tighten the ease of borrowing money, and of paying back the money you already owe? That the economy seems to be doing better, so there's no need to flood it with so much cheap money anymore.
Trump, the GOP Congress, the RNC messaging department, and retarded conservative pundits all over the media keep touting how well the GDP growth has been (bubble, only benefitting top 1%), how astronomically the stock market has risen, how low unemployment has fallen (stopped looking for work, since labor participation is also falling), and now how turbo-charged it's going to get after passing massive tax cuts supposedly for corporations and wealthy people to do more hiring, pay higher wages, etc.
Naturally, these tax cuts will go right back into the pockets of the wealthy, as they always have. But the promises from the GOP have been consistently about how much better the economy and job creation is going to be because of the cuts.
"OK then," the Fed will respond. "It sounds like it's the perfect time to raise interest rates!"
And then blammo, the massive debt floating around -- made even worse by the $1 trillion tax cut -- is going to cost 10 times as much to pay back, and everyone's going to declare bankruptcy unless they can get bailed out (too big to fail is even worse after eight years of constant bail-outs).
The Republicans are too dumb to try to blame the Fed for raising interest rates, because they are too weak to attack the main power faction of their rival party, the finance sector. A party in decline does not attack the strongest part of its rival coalition, only the weakest part like labor unions. They probably would not even name the enemy by pointing out how the finance sector controls the Democrats in the same way that the military controls the GOP.
And even if they did try to explain how rising interest rates from the Democrats at the Fed have blown up the stock market, they would have to concede having lied about the state of the economy before the blow-up -- they gloated over and over about how awesome it had become under full GOP rule, and how even awesomer it was going to be with these gigantic tax cuts.
The Democrats will appear to have no blood on their hands, with Republicans taking all of the blame. The GOP will suffer in the mid-term elections if the Fed pulls the trigger with enough lead time for round-the-clock media coverage of the blown-up economy to seep into voters' brains by November.
The only time this didn't kill the Republicans' electoral prospects was during the Dot-com Bust, but that was only because Americans were rallying around the pro-military party after September 11th. Absent another 9/11 before the 2018 mid-terms, the GOP will have nothing to fall back on if the Fed has pulled the trigger by then.
Trump himself, who began as a de facto third party candidate and President, has by 2018 chosen to align himself 100% with the GOP's corporate agenda and the tax cuts and stock market growth specifically. It may be too late to shove McConnell and Ryan away and back-pedal on all those comments about how awesome the stock market bubble is.
Trump promised to become "the greatest jobs-producing President that God ever created," but by clinging to the GOP agenda and refusing to decry the stock market bubble, he could become remembered as the President who oversaw the mother of all economic blow-ups.
He did not help himself by bending over backward for the finance sector by appointing a Yellen clone to chair the Fed. He was pleading with them not to raise interest rates, in exchange for his appointing a chairman of their choice. But he's going to find out what brutal vicious killers the leading faction of the Democrat coalition is. They're going to raise rates and pop the bubble, regardless of the favor he did them by appointing a Yellen clone.
If the GOP factions like the military are willing to totally subvert and sabotage the positions he campaigned on, why would the Democrat factions be any less willing to stab him in the back?
"You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in!"
If someone can sneak some advice around the Iron Curtain that General Kelly from the Pentagon junta has erected around the President -- during Christmas parole? -- it would be for Trump to distance himself as far as possible from these phony economic indicators.
Reiterate his famous phrase, "Folks, I inherited a big fat ugly mess," and return to attacking GOP saboteurs and Democrat opportunists alike. The GOP passed a massive tax cut that they knew would just be pocketed by corporate stockholders, and the Democrats kept interest rates near 0 under Obama for partisan reasons, and are only going to raise them now in order to destroy their rival party, and Trump personally.
Call out the widening trade deficits as a sign that the GOP is not bringing him his tariffs in order to return manufacturing, and that the real economy is only getting worse. "I never should have trusted the puppets of the Chamber of Commerce, folks, and I'm going to make it up by steering the boat in an entirely new direction."
And if somehow The Powers That Be get him -- assassination, impeachment, whatever -- at least he will have gone down fighting against them and clearing his reputation. If things continue in the current direction, he's going to be remembered as someone who surrendered to the elites' agenda and got blamed for their colossal fuck-ups in the economy.
The signs that the stock market is a bubble are only clearer six months later -- a record number of record numbers, as we close out the year. Number of days with record-high closings, number of months of stock market growth (all 12), absolute level of the peaks (now 25,000), probably a record in the percent growth in a single year (about 25%), etc.
That is the subjective speculation about what the value is of these companies, largely driven by internet and tech companies. The objective reality is that so many still don't earn anything, and the valuations compared to their sales is at a record high (outta-whack).
There has been no observable revolution in our economy -- we would see it, and feel it, like the Industrial Revolution planting factories all over the landscape, and newfound wealth pouring into our households as we left behind poor-paying agriculture. The holdovers from the real economy are being shuttered and swept aside also at a record pace, especially retail.
But trade deficits are growing at a rate and to a level they haven't seen since before the Great Recession -- another sign that the real economy, like manufacturing, is being even more vigorously shipped out of our country and into China, Mexico, Vietnam, etc., while we are left with servant jobs at Starbucks and imaginary wealth from tech start-ups (for the few who even land a job in that sector).
Debt, even compared to GDP, is still rising -- and may go back to skyrocketing after the $1 trillion tax cut, War on Terror 2.0 against Iran, etc.
All of this phony activity is being fueled by cheap money, driven by low interest rates that make borrowing easy, particularly for large entities.
At some point, the Federal Reserve, which sets these interest rates, has to deliver a day of reckoning -- but not when their own party is in the White House! That's the big piece of the puzzle that observers like Schiff missed during the Great Recession: the finance sector controls the Democrat party, so like hell they're going to pop a bubble when a Democrat is President.
But now that their rival party is in power -- indeed, in control of the entire government -- the finance sector can deliver the day of reckoning, when it can pin the blame on the other side of the great big struggle between elite factions.
Here is a graph showing interest rates, along with recessions in shaded columns. Notice how a spike in interest rates precedes a recession:
There is one major exception, when they raised rates in 1994 without triggering a recession. That's because the growth in debt (to GDP) had plateaued and even declined starting in 1993:
A spike in interest rates is the spark, and soaring debt is the gas. Since the major economic players were not projecting soaring debt during the mid-1990s, the spike in interest rates did not set off a cascade of bankruptcies or threats to bring down the whole economy unless they were bailed out.
And notice who was President then -- a Democrat! Generally, debt has been growing since around 1980, and every time the Fed has raised interest rates and then triggered a recession, it has been under Republican Presidents. They held rates comically low, around 0, for all 8 years of Obama. But once Trump got elected, they raised it for the first time in a long while, and have raised it three more times this year. They're clearly on track to jack them up even more next year.
What will be their rationale for raising interest rates to tighten the ease of borrowing money, and of paying back the money you already owe? That the economy seems to be doing better, so there's no need to flood it with so much cheap money anymore.
Trump, the GOP Congress, the RNC messaging department, and retarded conservative pundits all over the media keep touting how well the GDP growth has been (bubble, only benefitting top 1%), how astronomically the stock market has risen, how low unemployment has fallen (stopped looking for work, since labor participation is also falling), and now how turbo-charged it's going to get after passing massive tax cuts supposedly for corporations and wealthy people to do more hiring, pay higher wages, etc.
Naturally, these tax cuts will go right back into the pockets of the wealthy, as they always have. But the promises from the GOP have been consistently about how much better the economy and job creation is going to be because of the cuts.
"OK then," the Fed will respond. "It sounds like it's the perfect time to raise interest rates!"
And then blammo, the massive debt floating around -- made even worse by the $1 trillion tax cut -- is going to cost 10 times as much to pay back, and everyone's going to declare bankruptcy unless they can get bailed out (too big to fail is even worse after eight years of constant bail-outs).
The Republicans are too dumb to try to blame the Fed for raising interest rates, because they are too weak to attack the main power faction of their rival party, the finance sector. A party in decline does not attack the strongest part of its rival coalition, only the weakest part like labor unions. They probably would not even name the enemy by pointing out how the finance sector controls the Democrats in the same way that the military controls the GOP.
And even if they did try to explain how rising interest rates from the Democrats at the Fed have blown up the stock market, they would have to concede having lied about the state of the economy before the blow-up -- they gloated over and over about how awesome it had become under full GOP rule, and how even awesomer it was going to be with these gigantic tax cuts.
The Democrats will appear to have no blood on their hands, with Republicans taking all of the blame. The GOP will suffer in the mid-term elections if the Fed pulls the trigger with enough lead time for round-the-clock media coverage of the blown-up economy to seep into voters' brains by November.
The only time this didn't kill the Republicans' electoral prospects was during the Dot-com Bust, but that was only because Americans were rallying around the pro-military party after September 11th. Absent another 9/11 before the 2018 mid-terms, the GOP will have nothing to fall back on if the Fed has pulled the trigger by then.
Trump himself, who began as a de facto third party candidate and President, has by 2018 chosen to align himself 100% with the GOP's corporate agenda and the tax cuts and stock market growth specifically. It may be too late to shove McConnell and Ryan away and back-pedal on all those comments about how awesome the stock market bubble is.
Trump promised to become "the greatest jobs-producing President that God ever created," but by clinging to the GOP agenda and refusing to decry the stock market bubble, he could become remembered as the President who oversaw the mother of all economic blow-ups.
He did not help himself by bending over backward for the finance sector by appointing a Yellen clone to chair the Fed. He was pleading with them not to raise interest rates, in exchange for his appointing a chairman of their choice. But he's going to find out what brutal vicious killers the leading faction of the Democrat coalition is. They're going to raise rates and pop the bubble, regardless of the favor he did them by appointing a Yellen clone.
If the GOP factions like the military are willing to totally subvert and sabotage the positions he campaigned on, why would the Democrat factions be any less willing to stab him in the back?
"You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in!"
If someone can sneak some advice around the Iron Curtain that General Kelly from the Pentagon junta has erected around the President -- during Christmas parole? -- it would be for Trump to distance himself as far as possible from these phony economic indicators.
Reiterate his famous phrase, "Folks, I inherited a big fat ugly mess," and return to attacking GOP saboteurs and Democrat opportunists alike. The GOP passed a massive tax cut that they knew would just be pocketed by corporate stockholders, and the Democrats kept interest rates near 0 under Obama for partisan reasons, and are only going to raise them now in order to destroy their rival party, and Trump personally.
Call out the widening trade deficits as a sign that the GOP is not bringing him his tariffs in order to return manufacturing, and that the real economy is only getting worse. "I never should have trusted the puppets of the Chamber of Commerce, folks, and I'm going to make it up by steering the boat in an entirely new direction."
And if somehow The Powers That Be get him -- assassination, impeachment, whatever -- at least he will have gone down fighting against them and clearing his reputation. If things continue in the current direction, he's going to be remembered as someone who surrendered to the elites' agenda and got blamed for their colossal fuck-ups in the economy.
December 18, 2017
Trade deficits widening under GOP rule, as de-industrialization and impoverishment continue
This topic is so crucial to the (increasingly bleak) project of re-aligning the GOP toward a populist party under Trump, that we will have to split this up into an ongoing series of posts on the unique role of manufacturing in providing prosperity for the working and middle classes, and how manufacturing's prospects are determined by trade policy, such as allowing companies to off-shore their production to countries where labor is cheaper, decimating American workers, their families, and their communities.
For now, we will review the trajectory of trade deficits since Trump has taken office.
On the campaign trail, Trump devoted time at every rally and interview to slamming our unbalanced trade deficits with other countries, especially with Mexico and Asian countries, where American companies have transferred factories to be operated by cheap labor.
During the prosperous period of our nation's history, we ran trade surpluses rather than deficits -- right up through the early 1970s. Since the second half of the '70s, we have been consistently running trade deficits, and they have been growing wider. This coincides with stagnating and declining standards of living for most people other than the elites, whose standards have been taking off like a rocket.
Although underway by the Carter administration, these deficits get much worse when the cheap labor lobby inks a major free trade deal such as NAFTA, or letting China into the World Trade Organization.
As a candidate, Trump sought to gut these free trade deals, which would then restore the trade balance to a surplus rather than a deficit, which would go along with good-paying manufacturing jobs returning to this country, which would raise incomes for working and middle class Americans -- and that higher pay would be paid by the elite employer class, so that inequality would narrow from both directions (higher wages for workers, lower profits for stockholders, identical prices for consumers).
And yet under the GOP-controlled government, trade deficits have been widening, not narrowing. See here for data by country, which is sorted by year from 1985 through today, at monthly intervals.
We are only looking at the "trade in goods" rather than "in services" because the service industries where we dominate relative to other countries do not provide many jobs, and are at the elite pay level. For example, some American lawyer who does consulting work for a Chinese bank that wants to enter the American financial services sector, and needs to know the ins and outs of the American laws that regulate banking.
We're focused on the middle and working classes, and we do not net-export services at that income level. I'm sure when you do look at services done by working and middle class people, like answering phones at a call center, we're running massive deficits there too.
From January through October, our trade deficit with the entire world is 8% bigger than the same period last year. After the final two months of data are in, the year's deficit will still probably be 7-8% bigger than it was for 2016. It will wind up a bit under $800 billion, the highest it has been since the twilight years of the Housing Bubble. It actually declined and rose only meagerly under the following two terms of Democrat rule.
Just to pick two countries that Trump rightly railed against regarding trade deficits, let's look at China and Mexico. Our deficit with China has grown by 7% for the year so far, and will round out the year that way as well. This is within the range that we saw under Obama, although it will be the largest amount ever, at around $370 billion. Our deficit with Mexico has grown by an even faster rate, by 10%, which is a higher rate than most of Obama's years. It will wind up around $70 billion -- also the highest it's been since 2007.
Go on down the list of countries with whom we have the biggest trade deficits in Asia -- they will all be the same or worse. Especially for up-and-coming countries like Vietnam, whose rapid ascent Trump warned about constantly on the trail. Our deficit with them will explode by a whopping 20%, at just under $40 billion.
Why is this bad? For economic and for political reasons.
Economically, the continued rise in trade deficits, at even higher rates than under Obama, signals the continued de-industrialization of our economy. Mexico and Asia are not producing the same kinds of things we are, only better -- rather, they are producing manufactured goods, while we do agricultural products.
"Japan sends us cars by the shipload, and all we send them -- is beef. And wheat. And corn."
Manufactured goods are expensive and their industry pays high wages, while agricultural products are cheap and their industry pays diddly squat -- when that labor is even done by Americans (more likely by immigrants, legal or illegal).
The trade imbalance reflects the structural differences in our economies -- they have industrialized manufacturing, like an advanced economy, and we have agriculture and natural resources like a backward economy of 5,000 years ago. (But don't worry, here in America you also have a one-in-a-million chance of getting into a truly advanced career like legal consulting to foreign banks, or a know-nothing pundit for a media monopoly outlet, where you'll make a killing.)
As our trade deficits widen, it shows the further impoverishment of the working and middle classes here.
Politically, the widening deficits reveal the inability of Trump and his trade hawk advisors to steer the federal agencies, the lawmakers in Congress, and the decision-makers at American companies in the direction of re-industrializing our economy.
Without those results, Rust Belt voters will be much less enthusiastic about turning out to vote Republican again, and may go back to the Democrats, who are more reliable on trade policy and protecting manufacturing jobs. That choice will be even easier because Democrat politicians from the Rust Belt run on these populist issues, rather than the off-putting identity politics of a corporate shill like Nancy Pelosi. Midwestern Republicans are openly the country club yuppie elitist party, and none will be able to even ape Trump on economic policy, let alone deliver.
The more disturbing lesson is that Trump and the trade hawks will have failed to deliver despite belonging to the same party as the heads of the executive-branch agencies and both houses of Congress. Obviously that is damning not of Trump, Lighthizer, Navarro, et al., but of the GOP politicians and civil servants as a whole. They will be standing in mutiny against the supposed leader of their party, who is communicating the will of their own party's voters (and the general electorate), and suffering no consequences.
We know it is an outright mutiny because Trump specifically demanded tariffs from his economic team and General Kelly, as that member of the Pentagon junta took over as Chief of Staff back in August. Tariffs could penalize American companies who off-shore production, and would restore manufacturing jobs here, reducing the trade deficit as we made our own products rather than import cheap crap from China and Mexico.
Trump was already complaining at the end of July about the lack of tariffs, and none are on the way despite vociferously demanding them from his team.
Again, the Republicans are not simply halting progress, or slow-walking it -- the trade deficits are getting worse, and by a similar rate or faster than under Obama. Far from expressing concern over the widening deficits, they are forging ahead with GOP business as usual, chuckling at the Trump movement's expense, and have yet to pay the price for it. The elite factions that control the GOP are simply too reliant on cheap labor, representing labor-intensive sectors of the economy, but that's for another post.
At least in the short-term, it will be far easier to re-align the Democrats to be trade hawks and re-industrializers than the Republicans. Their politicians' records on trade deals are far better (again, a topic for another post), and they are in league with unions whose collective power would be ruined if their industries were sent overseas. And there is a populist insurgency within their party (the Bernie revolution) that is on the brink of taking over the wheel, however slowly or rapidly it winds up proceeding in their new direction.
We keep looking for signs of an economic populist re-alignment from the government totally controlled by the GOP -- and we keep coming up with "they are only doubling down on corporate elitism". They sense their terminal decline as a presidential party, and are using Trump's shock victory to ram through all the elitist bullshit they've been dreaming of but could never win an election on.
If their results destroy Trump's image as a populist, the GOP doesn't care. And if it makes Rust Belt voters go back to voting blue, they don't care either. They're perfectly happy to lose the White House after they've rammed through their limited number of Big Policy Ideas that everyone hates.
They may even give up after tax cuts, which they know like the back of their hand. Maybe a knowingly futile attempt at gutting the social safety net, just to run out the clock. Really -- what other Big Policy Ideas do they have waiting in the wings? They didn't even know what the fuck to do with Obamacare. Hence the constant beating of the war drums -- the only other thing the GOP knows like the back of its hand, launching and losing pointless wars. This time against an even less beatable nation than Iraq, and that has never attacked us -- Iran.
All the ideas and plans, all the action and excitement, is going to be on the Democrats' side, as the Bernie revolution wrings more and more concessions from their party's Establishment. The independents who were decisive in winning the election for Trump now know where to direct our time, money, and effort in order to Make America Great Again -- and it's not the GOP.
For now, we will review the trajectory of trade deficits since Trump has taken office.
On the campaign trail, Trump devoted time at every rally and interview to slamming our unbalanced trade deficits with other countries, especially with Mexico and Asian countries, where American companies have transferred factories to be operated by cheap labor.
During the prosperous period of our nation's history, we ran trade surpluses rather than deficits -- right up through the early 1970s. Since the second half of the '70s, we have been consistently running trade deficits, and they have been growing wider. This coincides with stagnating and declining standards of living for most people other than the elites, whose standards have been taking off like a rocket.
Although underway by the Carter administration, these deficits get much worse when the cheap labor lobby inks a major free trade deal such as NAFTA, or letting China into the World Trade Organization.
As a candidate, Trump sought to gut these free trade deals, which would then restore the trade balance to a surplus rather than a deficit, which would go along with good-paying manufacturing jobs returning to this country, which would raise incomes for working and middle class Americans -- and that higher pay would be paid by the elite employer class, so that inequality would narrow from both directions (higher wages for workers, lower profits for stockholders, identical prices for consumers).
And yet under the GOP-controlled government, trade deficits have been widening, not narrowing. See here for data by country, which is sorted by year from 1985 through today, at monthly intervals.
We are only looking at the "trade in goods" rather than "in services" because the service industries where we dominate relative to other countries do not provide many jobs, and are at the elite pay level. For example, some American lawyer who does consulting work for a Chinese bank that wants to enter the American financial services sector, and needs to know the ins and outs of the American laws that regulate banking.
We're focused on the middle and working classes, and we do not net-export services at that income level. I'm sure when you do look at services done by working and middle class people, like answering phones at a call center, we're running massive deficits there too.
From January through October, our trade deficit with the entire world is 8% bigger than the same period last year. After the final two months of data are in, the year's deficit will still probably be 7-8% bigger than it was for 2016. It will wind up a bit under $800 billion, the highest it has been since the twilight years of the Housing Bubble. It actually declined and rose only meagerly under the following two terms of Democrat rule.
Just to pick two countries that Trump rightly railed against regarding trade deficits, let's look at China and Mexico. Our deficit with China has grown by 7% for the year so far, and will round out the year that way as well. This is within the range that we saw under Obama, although it will be the largest amount ever, at around $370 billion. Our deficit with Mexico has grown by an even faster rate, by 10%, which is a higher rate than most of Obama's years. It will wind up around $70 billion -- also the highest it's been since 2007.
Go on down the list of countries with whom we have the biggest trade deficits in Asia -- they will all be the same or worse. Especially for up-and-coming countries like Vietnam, whose rapid ascent Trump warned about constantly on the trail. Our deficit with them will explode by a whopping 20%, at just under $40 billion.
Why is this bad? For economic and for political reasons.
Economically, the continued rise in trade deficits, at even higher rates than under Obama, signals the continued de-industrialization of our economy. Mexico and Asia are not producing the same kinds of things we are, only better -- rather, they are producing manufactured goods, while we do agricultural products.
"Japan sends us cars by the shipload, and all we send them -- is beef. And wheat. And corn."
Manufactured goods are expensive and their industry pays high wages, while agricultural products are cheap and their industry pays diddly squat -- when that labor is even done by Americans (more likely by immigrants, legal or illegal).
The trade imbalance reflects the structural differences in our economies -- they have industrialized manufacturing, like an advanced economy, and we have agriculture and natural resources like a backward economy of 5,000 years ago. (But don't worry, here in America you also have a one-in-a-million chance of getting into a truly advanced career like legal consulting to foreign banks, or a know-nothing pundit for a media monopoly outlet, where you'll make a killing.)
As our trade deficits widen, it shows the further impoverishment of the working and middle classes here.
Politically, the widening deficits reveal the inability of Trump and his trade hawk advisors to steer the federal agencies, the lawmakers in Congress, and the decision-makers at American companies in the direction of re-industrializing our economy.
Without those results, Rust Belt voters will be much less enthusiastic about turning out to vote Republican again, and may go back to the Democrats, who are more reliable on trade policy and protecting manufacturing jobs. That choice will be even easier because Democrat politicians from the Rust Belt run on these populist issues, rather than the off-putting identity politics of a corporate shill like Nancy Pelosi. Midwestern Republicans are openly the country club yuppie elitist party, and none will be able to even ape Trump on economic policy, let alone deliver.
The more disturbing lesson is that Trump and the trade hawks will have failed to deliver despite belonging to the same party as the heads of the executive-branch agencies and both houses of Congress. Obviously that is damning not of Trump, Lighthizer, Navarro, et al., but of the GOP politicians and civil servants as a whole. They will be standing in mutiny against the supposed leader of their party, who is communicating the will of their own party's voters (and the general electorate), and suffering no consequences.
We know it is an outright mutiny because Trump specifically demanded tariffs from his economic team and General Kelly, as that member of the Pentagon junta took over as Chief of Staff back in August. Tariffs could penalize American companies who off-shore production, and would restore manufacturing jobs here, reducing the trade deficit as we made our own products rather than import cheap crap from China and Mexico.
Trump was already complaining at the end of July about the lack of tariffs, and none are on the way despite vociferously demanding them from his team.
Again, the Republicans are not simply halting progress, or slow-walking it -- the trade deficits are getting worse, and by a similar rate or faster than under Obama. Far from expressing concern over the widening deficits, they are forging ahead with GOP business as usual, chuckling at the Trump movement's expense, and have yet to pay the price for it. The elite factions that control the GOP are simply too reliant on cheap labor, representing labor-intensive sectors of the economy, but that's for another post.
At least in the short-term, it will be far easier to re-align the Democrats to be trade hawks and re-industrializers than the Republicans. Their politicians' records on trade deals are far better (again, a topic for another post), and they are in league with unions whose collective power would be ruined if their industries were sent overseas. And there is a populist insurgency within their party (the Bernie revolution) that is on the brink of taking over the wheel, however slowly or rapidly it winds up proceeding in their new direction.
We keep looking for signs of an economic populist re-alignment from the government totally controlled by the GOP -- and we keep coming up with "they are only doubling down on corporate elitism". They sense their terminal decline as a presidential party, and are using Trump's shock victory to ram through all the elitist bullshit they've been dreaming of but could never win an election on.
If their results destroy Trump's image as a populist, the GOP doesn't care. And if it makes Rust Belt voters go back to voting blue, they don't care either. They're perfectly happy to lose the White House after they've rammed through their limited number of Big Policy Ideas that everyone hates.
They may even give up after tax cuts, which they know like the back of their hand. Maybe a knowingly futile attempt at gutting the social safety net, just to run out the clock. Really -- what other Big Policy Ideas do they have waiting in the wings? They didn't even know what the fuck to do with Obamacare. Hence the constant beating of the war drums -- the only other thing the GOP knows like the back of its hand, launching and losing pointless wars. This time against an even less beatable nation than Iraq, and that has never attacked us -- Iran.
All the ideas and plans, all the action and excitement, is going to be on the Democrats' side, as the Bernie revolution wrings more and more concessions from their party's Establishment. The independents who were decisive in winning the election for Trump now know where to direct our time, money, and effort in order to Make America Great Again -- and it's not the GOP.
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