Trump the Clown is also a Ding Dong…which is the basis of our musical selections at the bottom here in part 3. But evidence of who our prez really is, Trump the Clown, is all around us. Here in part 3, we always highlight the policy agenda of Trump the Clown & his handling of the economy. Our views & the articles we post are not as flattering of our 45th President & his economic policies as has been widely reported. We believe we were already on the trajectory for a strong economy based on good job creation & low unemployment rates long before Trump entered office. We also adamantly believe the economy is not nearly as good as touted, since the monthly jobs reports do paint a picture of an economy with lots of jobs available, but most are lousy, low-paying, dead-end jobs.
Tragic Stats of a Stressed-Out Society for Workers
This article speaks for itself: cdc-suicide-rates-increasing-among-american-workers. The American Dream is hanging by a thread as for far too many Americans, shared prosperity & upward mobility are increasingly something seen in our rearview mirrors from the previous century. It’s an issue that begs to be solved, if our political leadership could ever quit fighting each other long enough to focus in on the problems (& solutions). The basic challenge for the working class is twofold, that for decades real wages have basically flatlined, while the basic cost of living for essentials have outpaced the pay. The sobering reality is brought home in these excerpts from the-cost-of-living-is-rising-and-many-americans-cant-afford-it:
On the surface, things are going well in America. The unemployment rate — at 3.7 percent — is at its lowest level in decades. Annual wage growth recently hit a nine-year high. And the latest figures from the Commerce Department show that the U.S. economy continues to grow. But that doesn’t mean all Americans are doing well. In fact, GOBankingRates found that it’s gotten tougher for many people to afford basic necessities. We examined the cost of living throughout the U.S. over the past few years to see how much it has increased. Then, we surveyed Americans to find out how much they’re spending on necessities. The average spending of respondents in each state was then compared with the median income in each state to determine whether people can realistically afford the cost of living where they are.
The cost of living in America has climbed 14 percent over the past three years, according to a GOBankingRates’ analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index. The index measures the change in prices paid for goods and services, including food, shelter, energy, transportation and medical care. We also looked at housing cost data supplied by Zillow. The median home price has soared 21 percent from $215,000 in January 2015 to $260,000 in January 2018. And the median rent has climbed 7.6 percent over the same period from $1,340 to $1,442. The jump in the cost of living means Americans need to earn more to live comfortably. However, GOBankingRates found that the median household income isn’t keeping up with the rising cost of living in America’s largest cities.
Contributing to Our Huge National Debt
Despite his campaign spiel, it looks like Trump the clown has given up on deficit reduction: how-octobers-nine-figure-federal-deficit-compares-historically. Military & budget wise, I’m rather hawkish since America has a unique obligation to preserve freedom & repel evil around the world, but we need to be smart about it. Surgical strikes against terrorist targets would have been far more efficient & economical, rather than trying to engage in nation building with large troop deployments halfway round the world. The costs are outlined in excerpts from study-us-has-spent-nearly-6t-on-war-since-9-11:
The United States is on track to have spent nearly $6 trillion on war since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a report released Wednesday. The annual analysis from the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University far exceeds Pentagon estimates because it looks at all war-related costs — including the Pentagon’s war fund, related spending at the State Department, veterans care and interest payments — for military operations in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere. “We were told to expect wars that would be quick, cheap, effective and beneficial to the U.S. interest,” study author Neta Crawford said at a Capitol Hill news conference. “Because we finance these wars on a credit card, the costs of the wars themselves pose a national security challenge.”
The study estimates that war-related spending through fiscal 2019 will total $4.9 trillion. Another projected $1 trillion for veterans care through fiscal 2059 brings the total to $5.9 trillion, according to the study. Should the wars continue through fiscal 2023, total costs will be more than $6.7 trillion, the study added, citing the Pentagon’s projected future years’ spending and likely needs for veterans. “It’s important for the American people to understand the true costs of war, both the moral and monetary costs,” Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said in a statement. “Our nation continues to finance wars and military operations through borrowing, rather than asking people to contribute to the national defense directly, and the result is a serious fiscal drag that we’re not really accounting for or factoring into deliberations about fiscal policy or military policy.”
It’s Worth a Try
Anything to get Congress to work together again in making them more productive on behalf of the American people. Here are thoughts on why good policy ideas never see the light of day with an idea how to help remedy that, as these excerpts were pulled from getting-back-to-governing:
Last September, one of us (Spulak) co-authored an op-ed with George Crawford, another former Democratic staff director of the House Rules Committee, suggesting a simple, one-step way “to fix” Congress: “Free the House Rules Committee” (Politico, Sept. 19, 2018). By loosening the ties between the majority leadership and the committee, they argued, the House could return to the days when Congress worked — “when debate mattered and compromise existed.” In October, the other author of this piece (Wolfensberger), published a book that proposed a new, yet old, method of putting Congress back on track: embrace a culture of big-picture governing in which the House would first debate the overall nature of a major problem, and possible solutions to it, before sending the issue to the appropriate committee with instructions to work out the details (“Changing Cultures in Congress: From Fair Play to Power Plays”). As former staff directors of the Rules Committee from opposing parties, we think these two approaches, when combined, present a clear path for the House to both re-engage individual members and the American public in the important business of governing in the national interest. And, given the flip in party control of the House in last Tuesday’s midterm elections, there could be no better time or opportunity to try a new approach to governing.
The top-down, micro-managing of the legislative process by the majority party leadership, regardless of which party is in control, has discouraged members from developing expertise and ideas to address major problems. Notwithstanding pledges by minority party leaders to return the House to the “regular order” if they regain the majority, those pledges are soon forgotten as their legislative agenda takes priority under a leadership-driven irregular process. It’s not that leaders of either party have been purposely deceptive, but that they realize how little time two years is to fulfill their policy promises. As more than one majority leadership figure has put it in the past: “The American people don’t care how we do things; they just want results.” And yet, when one considers how integral the procedures of our democracy are to member engagement and public trust, we recognize how foolish it is to dismiss procedural fairness and genuine deliberation out of hand. Woodrow Wilson, in his 1885 treatise, “Congressional Government,” wrote that Congress gets so caught-up in the weeds of legislation that it loses sight of what should be its major role –sharing in the business of governing. In addition to restoring such authority to the committee, we think the committee can play a creative role in shaping the big-picture governing debates we argue for here. If one thing comes across loud and clear from the statements of members who voluntarily retire, it is their frustration over not being allowed to play a meaningful role in the policy process. By returning to the kind of big-picture governing debates conducted by early Congresses and linking those to committee oversight and legislative work, members should be able to play that larger role and, in the process do a better job of informing the people of what their government is up to and what Congress is doing about it.
Yes, It Is Possible!
There are times when legislation makes so much sense, the President & both sides in Congress really can get productive things done on a bipartisan basis, as seen in this prison reform legislation: trump-backs-package-of-changes-to-criminal-justice-system-as-lame-duck-session-b. And how about this extremely unusual meeting of the minds coming from someone on the extreme right & another on the extreme left. And as someone in the center, I also agree we should rightly question the wisdom of giving valuable taxpayer funding to the world’s richest man, found in these excerpts from tucker-carlson-backs-ocasio-cortez-on-criticism-of-amazon-hq2-incentives. It also highlights the crude reality the largest/wealthiest corporations keep getting the breaks over smaller (& practically nonexistent) competitors, & the well-to-do coastal cities who are the hub of this corporate growth keep profiting at the expense of the rest of the country:
Fox News host Tucker Carlson says Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) “has a very good point” in criticizing Amazon for receiving taxpayer subsidies for its new headquarters, asking, “How does that work?” Carlson admitted on his prime-time program late Tuesday that while he hated “to admit it,” he agreed with Ocasio-Cortez’s perspective. “Jeff Bezos, who is the world’s richest man, will receive more than $2 billion in subsidies from you, the taxpayer,” he stated. “New Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had this to say: ‘Amazon is a billion-dollar company. The idea it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax rates at a time when a subway is crumbling in our communities need more investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here.’”
“I hate to admit it, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a very good point,” Carlson continued. “It’s hard to argue with the internal logic, the richest man in the world just got $2 billion in taxpayer subsidies. How does that work?” The anomalous agreement between the conservative host and the newly elected democratic socialist comes after Amazon announced Monday it had chosen Long Island City, in the Queens borough of New York City, and the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, Va., as the sites of a new split headquarters. Amazon is owned by the richest man on the planet, Jeff Bezos, who is ranked No. 1 on Forbes’s annual list, ahead of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The retail giant became only the second company to hit $1 trillion in market capitalization, after Apple achieved the mark in August. Ocasio-Cortez said on Twitter that the residents she represents have expressed “outrage” over the tax breaks Amazon will receive as part of the incentive to move to Queens while arguing that the company is receiving money while the city’s subway “is crumbling.”
The Fix Was In!
Yes, the rich keep getting richer, both large/profitable corporations & growing/prosperous cities. The second tiered cities tried to play the game, but the deck was stacked against them & they never really stood a chance. Yet the winning cities, who don’t need Amazon nearly as much as the others, still had to kowtow to the corporate giant with enormous perks: amazon-fleeced-new-york-virginia-with-hq2-pick. But guess what? Our politicians also kowtow to these monstrous corporate interests. The wealthiest are the most powerful & call the monopolistic shots. I don’t think free-market capitalism operates at a healthy level when the competitive marketplace is so overwhelmingly one-sided. There’s no mystery to what we really need: amazon-hq2-jobs. This posting below is the start to rejected-by-amazon-cities-ponder-next-steps:
What could have been. “It could’ve changed the city,” developer Marc Weller said. He sat in a quiet conference room not far from Port Covington, the waterfront industrial space on Baltimore’s south end pitched as the perfect home for Amazon’s second headquarters. A year ago, this same conference room brimmed with civic leaders giddy over Amazon’s open casting call for any North American big city to audition for a once-in-a-generation role. Baltimore was all in. So were dozens of other cities. It didn’t feel like the usual corporate site selection process. It seemed like Amazon wanted to make a real statement with what was known as HQ2. Why else stage such a peculiar and public spectacle? And then Amazon announced this week HQ2’s 50,000 high-paying jobs would be split between Crystal City, outside Washington, and Long Island City, in New York.
“The usual suspects,” Weller said, “and they don’t need an Amazon.” Not like Baltimore does. Or Philadelphia. Buffalo. Charlotte, even. Or Detroit. “In hindsight,” Weller said, “it feels like we were never in the running.” The 236 bridesmaid cities that failed to capture Amazon’s eye are facing renewed insecurities about their ability to compete for the so-called knowledge jobs that will drive the country’s future economic growth. Some have suggested the losing pitches were good training for the next big deal. Others hope that Amazon might use the data-rich bid documents to locate other projects. That’s apparently what happened with Nashville, which walked away Tuesday with a promise of 5,000 new Amazon jobs. But Amazon’s hunt was unnerving for many cities. The final decision to go with two fast-growing coastal hubs only highlighted worries about the modern economy’s winner-take-all dynamic. “This is a ‘rich get richer’ story,” said Stephen Walters, an economics professor at Loyola University Maryland. “And it raises a big question for these other cities: How do you get into that league?”
Election Lessons
An article showing the sane Republican vote saved the day for democracy, so we can hold Trump accountable:
https://www.vox.com/2018/11/15/18078974/trump-gop-midterms-2018-arizona-texas-never-trump
The women vote really made the difference:
Latinos are also being energized & mobilized:
3 articles showing this insane Trumpian cult might be fading:
Trump chose to campaign on the migrant caravan rather than the economy, but there was a lot more to this election: not-even-the-good-economy-can-protect-trump-and-the-gop. Maybe, just maybe, these election results can help loosen Trump’s stranglehold grip on the party, revealed in excerpts seen inside the-republican-partys-woman-problem, with women leading the way:
It has been long rumored that the Republican Party has a woman problem, so much so that a few years ago, GOP congressmen sent aides to classes on how to talk to and about women. Republicans didn’t learn much. Their articulation issues just got much worse, and there’s a name for the problem: Donald Trump. In addition to his many dubious accomplishments, the president has succeeded in nearly purging Republican women from the House of Representatives. If this was supposed to be the year of the woman, it has been the year only of Democratic women. The blue wave washed away a significant number of strong female candidates on the GOP side — both incumbents and newcomers — likely leaving just 12, down from 23. (Though three races were still pending on Tuesday, Republicans had little hope their candidates would win in two of them.)
According to Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman, of the projected 31 members of the rising Republican freshman class, only one is a woman, compared with the Democrats’ projected freshman class of 61, of which 35 are women. Which means the Republican House just became a lot more of what it didn’t need to be — more male. Democratic women cleaned house in suburban districts. With just a dozen women, this also means several committees and subcommittees will have no Republican women on them. Trump, naturally, has blamed Republican losses on some candidates’ failure to accept his “embrace.” At least they weren’t asked to kiss his ring, yet. In post-election remarks last week, the president mocked those who “lost” their races, naming, among others, Utah Rep. Mia Love (who hasn’t officially lost yet), and Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock.
Embracing the president was by no means a fast track to victory. In some cases, when candidates did accept Trump’s love, they might as well have received the kiss of death. Many lost anyway. Republican men, too, suffered losses after accepting, presumably, a man-hug from Trump. Rep. Dave Brat lost in Virginia; Kris Kobach, who was endorsed by Trump in the Kansas governor’s race, came up short. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher in California and Rod Blum in Iowa, both supported by Trump, also lost. Thus, it would appear the Trump embrace carries about as much magic as a blindworm’s sting. If Midas turned everything to gold, Trump seems to turn things blue. He may have noticed this himself, which may explain his petulance last week and his familiar dismissiveness toward “losers,” or those who reject his affections.
Ultimately, though, this election was about women and Trump, a verdict that likely only feeds his narcissism. But this analysis would be incomplete without also mentioning the media’s role as Trump’s creators and enablers, with the Democratic Party as beneficiary. Each time Trump does what he does, which is to provoke, the media sets its 24-hour news cycle on autopilot and Democrats count their blessings. Trump is the Democrats’ biggest fundraiser. He essentially financed the blue-and-pink wave to the detriment of his own party, especially women. Contrary to town criers coast to coast, the future doesn’t belong to womenin general. It belongs to Democratic women — and Trump owns that, too.
He’s In Way Over His Head
Trump the Clown is incompetent, clueless, petulant, buffoonish & untrustworthy. Other than that, he may have become an adequate president. A couple of Vox articles help illustrate the predicament we’re in. From trump-incompetent-authoritarian-david-brooks we see that autocrats can be incompetent. Posted below is the opening to the next article, which you can read the rest by clicking on donald-trump-daily-caller-interview:
In some ways, the friendliest Donald Trump interviews are the most revealing. Given the opportunity to ramble and free-associate without any pushback whatsoever, you can see what channels his mind naturally follows. His latest interview with the Daily Caller shows a president who’s fundamentally out to sea. The sycophantic interviewers can’t get Trump to answer a policy question of any kind, no matter how much of a softball they lob at him. The only subjects he is actually interested in talking about are his deranged belief in his incredible popularity and how that popularity is not reflected in actual vote totals because he’s the victim of a vast voter fraud conspiracy. It’s the kind of thing that would be a bit sad if it were just your elderly uncle ranting about his past glories, but Trump mixes it in with authoritarian asides and the fundamental reality that whether he cares to do the actual job or not, he is ultimately the president of the United States.
2 Songs for your listening pleasure
Trump the Clown is a ding-dong who is the ringmaster of his own chaotic/dysfunctional circus!: what-effect-does-the-trump-circus-have-on-the-world. We played the standard intro to the Mr. Rogers show a few weeks ago right after the Pittsburgh Squirrel Hill mass shooting. But this other show for kids certainly predates Mr. Rogers. Maybe it’s where Trump went to school back in the 1950’s, or it’s what he’s turned the White House into, a Ding Dong School: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dterNqnjUo.
The White House is indeed a circus run by clowns. Trump the clown had zero evidence for his crazy voter fraud claim about disguises & people changing their clothes in cars outside polling stations, but lucky for him Anderson Cooper provided the proof in this video: anderson-cooper-mocks-trumps-latest-voter-fraud-claim-with-clip-of-circus-clowns. America is on this surreal Journey which I keep Faithfully revealing Trump’s lies & corruption. So I picked this song with the band’s original singer in concert which the lyrics contain this verse:
Circus life
Under the big top world
We all need the clowns to make us smile
Through space and time
Always another show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aoPaI9mwcY
And this next video has the studio version of the same song. I really picked this song since I like it & wanted to hear it, with that famously powerful vocal conclusion:
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