Doing Nothing Not the Answer…How can this be called a strong economy when roughly half the population are struggling to get by? We’ve reentered another Gilded Age where the system allows top earners to manipulate factors in expanding their wealth, often to the detriment of the working class who are being taken advantage of. There is nothing on the horizon that doesn’t indicate the wide divides will keep escalating without some kind of smart policy intervention. But there is also absolutely nothing which suggests with our divided government that our leadership are going to get serious about crafting feasible solutions any time soon. I’m not advocating for welfare handouts, just give people willing to work for it a decent shot at economic security.
So as Americans we remain stuck in our distorted economy, structured so the vast wealth our country creates goes to too few, with politicians resting on their laurels in hiding behind misleading statistics skewed by most of the financial rewards going to the top. This new Gilded Age is defined by rising household & federal debts along with those widening gaps between the haves & have-nots, featuring growing anxiety among many middle-class families & various sectors of the economy. It’s a sign the raw numbers don’t tell the whole story. To the extent some headline economic data remains positive, it’s not so much from Trump’s tax cuts as it is to a large extent new technologies expanding our energy sources/supplies: https://www.axios.com/america-
The Real Economy
So as always in our Part 3’s, we post links to articles highlighting our ongoing structural economic difficulties which as a nation we’ve been thoroughly hapless in addressing, even though I’m confident we could find real remedies for reversing these negative trends if we only united in putting our minds to it. Workers have long needed creative policies which can allow them to sustain a decent living, but in DC they’re too busy fighting each other to actually work on behalf of the people. Besides these economic articles, further on below are outrageous excuses the GOP in unison keep offering up to defend an indefensible president, then at the bottom we conclude with our selected song which relates to our felon-in-chief:
Fair Trade Deals or Contrived Talking Points to Score Cheap Political Points?
Only time will tell, but consider the strong likelihood our prez is like a puppet on a string with Chinese leaders playing the puppetmaster. Everything Trump says is either a lie, distortion or exaggeration to exhort himself. So when he pumps up these great trade deals, we should reserve judgement until we study the details or even wait to see the effects they have. He’ll keep touting these agreements as the greatest thing since sliced bread, but if we take whatever he says & divide by 10 or even 100, we’ll be a whole lot closer to the truth.
As a fervent Trump critic, these trade negotiations are the one area I’ve generally given the prez a pass on. We’ve been getting our pockets picked & dealing with a slanted playing field for far too long, particularly with China. There are certainly a number of various factors at play, but overall the bad trade deals have shuttered an unknown number of factories & cost us who knows how many millions of good manufacturing jobs. The USMCA with Canada & Mexico as a replacement for NAFTA had not been much of an improvement over the old deal, but when I heard our Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown say on the morning talk shows today he’s now for the new deal since they’ve added in important labor protections, that’s good enough for me.
I loved John McCain. The Maverick was his own man, stood on principle & was a true American hero. He also managed to keep Lindsey Graham in line. As for who I most respect based on a scale of 1-10, I’d give McCain a +40 & Trump a -537. And when Trump stated at the start of his campaign in 2015 that McCain wasn’t a war hero because he was captured, that clarified in my own mind the hardened anti-Trump stance I developed. But I felt McCain made two huge mistakes in the 2008 campaign. The most obvious was when he famously chose Palin as his running mate. But he also stated he was the biggest free trader you’ll ever see, which I took that to mean America was to continue on its path of unfettered & unrestricted free trade, no matter how much our trading partners manipulate multiple factors in their favor to cheat us.
Such capitulation on trade has contributed for decades to the devastation of many families & communities here in the industrial Midwest. So on that note I’ve always favored Trump’s stance on trade over McCain’s even long before Trump ran for president. But in our attempt to level the playing field, as seen in these links we can certainly wonder about Trump’s approach & overly optimistic boasts, while his trade war has thrown the manufacturing sector into recession. On actually striking a substantive deal beyond phase one, how much longer can these negotiations drag on?:
https://www.washingtonpost.
Other Issues on the Economy
Including climate, health care & gun violence:
Disingenuous Talking Points as Republicans Admit the Senate Trial is Rigged
Revealed in the next set of links, this could only happen in established dictatorial regimes & Third-World banana republics, right? That’s why it’s so shocking that such shenanigans are happening here in America! When a major political party deals in untruths & the base compliantly buys in, it won’t be long before our constitutional democracy sustaining a free society is strained beyond repair & ultimately reduced to rubble. As a lifelong Republican I can’t explain what’s happened to them, as all I know is they’ve bought into the preposterous echo-falsehoods & it’s been very bad for the country.
Preserving this long-running miracle known as American democracy requires a citizenry able to agree around universal truths, but the GOP has moved into a distant alternate universe where fanatical tribal irrationality has trumped the facts. Here is the truth seen in these articles about the GOP’s disinformation over Ukraine, so please review to see if any of this makes any sense to you. Also see the Fox poll links at the bottom. Any objective person should easily see the GOP is lying to us. With a president who’s a pox on our country, I have very little patience for all these nonsensical & destructive excuses. These GOP pundits are insulting our intelligence & in doing so reveal their own stupidity:
Don’t Do the Crime If You Can’t Do the Time
That’s a lesson which has been lost on our prez. Donald Trump has been a cheat his whole life! Whether it’s cheating on his taxes, charities, contractors, university students or even cheating on his wives, his actions have always been done only for himself without regards to others. Maybe with those character traits it was easy for him to cross over into a life of crime, as he seems to consider himself above the law. The recent investigations since becoming president have revealed cheating in our elections by colluding with foreign nations, which is betraying his country & is also criminal behavior. So in recognition of Trump, this is a theme song from an old detective show:
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