Part Three – Trump DACA News, Amazon & Trade Wars

The story out there is the economy is strong, which much of the statistical data does indicate a solid economy.  For many Americans their careers & financial situations are moving along swimmingly.  But oft-times the stats don’t paint the whole picture or are downright misleading.  For starters, the tax cuts have borrowed off our futures.  Plus the country that creates the most wealth of any nation in the history of the world, to have roughly half the population mired in financial insecurity living paycheck-to-paycheck, that signals a structural flaw in the system no matter how rosy the economic stats might look.  It’s disturbing the way political leadership are hiding behind the numbers, to the point they won’t even lift a finger to address the fundamental problems that are corroding the very underpinnings of our society.  And without proper planning, it’s only going to keep getting immeasurably worse as automation, robotics, A.I. & oligopolistic practices are projected to keep wiping out middle class jobs on a mass scale.  Plus as our headline mentions about Trump DACA news, Amazon & trade wars, Trump’s own actions look to sabotage economic growth.

The likely greatest benefit of Trump, if we search real hard, is the way he’s willing to rattle the cages of entrenched political elitists, shaking up a DC culture that needs turned on its head.  To the extent there is some sort of deep state, it’s in crony bureaucrats putting in their time, waiting for the day they get their cushy pensions at the end of the rainbow, with very little understanding or even concern about the real struggles of the working class out in the heartlands.  The Trumpian populist approach is to aggressively propose changes that appeal to his base who have fallen through the cracks, living the nightmare of having their livelihoods pulled out from underneath them, without having any good options or brighter prospects for the future.  We see it playing out with Trump proposing tariffs on imported Chinese goods, since China has tilted trade decidedly in their favor for decades.  So while the intent may be good, the problem & concern comes in with Trump, his advisers & favorite TV network being effectively clueless on a myriad of issues, resulting in their solutions not bringing significant improvements while actually causing plenty of collateral damage.

As always, the Related Articles on the economy cover a variety of issues, with no easy solutions.  In the articles about Amazon, we see an impulsive Trump lashing out & seeking quick fix remedies.  It’s going to take a lot of thought from responsible leaders in figuring out a way to keep our free markets competitive, before behemoths like Amazon run roughshod over their smaller competitors, which are all those companies we’ve depended on to provide us with practically all the goods & services we need.  Our capitalist system was never meant for a single company to dominate a high percentage of our industries.  Ironically, a lot of smaller retailers whose sales have been hurt by Amazon, now have to rely on Amazon just to stay in business.  So I do agree the monopolistic Amazon can be a danger to businesses everywhere, but the reason to punish a company should not stem from revengeful motives against the ownership of the Washington Post.  Is Trump really trying to protect the competitiveness of free markets, or is his sinister motive a stealth attack on the free press?  And in legislating against monopolies, can a divided partisan government ever be trusted to intervene for the public good without screwing things up even worse?

In another group of links, we see for now the tariffs Trump imposed on steel & aluminum are escalating into a trade war with China.  Can this renowned Art of the Deal president negotiate more fair trade deals with China to help protect American manufacturing, or will this trade war cause higher prices for consumers as our economy slows?  So far, China has taken none too kindly to our tariffs: china-hits-us-with-new-tariffs-on-128-imports.  We’re already seeing how the stock market is reacting negatively to a potential trade war.  Other factors in the market’s recent slide are Trump’s verbal attacks on Amazon, Facebook’s platform which allows for election campaigns to be distorted by fake ads, & out-of-control federal budget deficits (worsened by Trump’s tax cuts).  Keep in mind if China’s retaliation holds, it would more than wipe out any tax cuts we got.  Perhaps the falling market will help push back on that narrative the economy is so strong: stocks-slide-as-china-announces-tariffs-on-us-imports.

There is a large group of links about the latest Trump DACA news, the wall & a “caravan” of immigrants.  In his own unique Christian spirit of the holiday, Trump delivered an Easter present to Dreamers proclaiming they’re no longer wanted here, saying a DACA deal is dead.  Trump lied yet again that Dems are to blame for no DACA deal.  The real truth is Trump surrounded himself with echo-knuckleheads at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend, who got the president’s dander stirred up to strike a hardline stance on immigrants.  He’s also wrong that DACA is the impetus for a flood of Latin American immigrants headed towards our border, since DACA is actually a program for those who were already here as kids.  And is there really a caravan of 1200 migrant Hondurans headed for the U.S. border, or is that just another echo-conspiracy perpetrated to gin up their base, the same ones infatuated with building that wall?  In his asinine statements over the weekend, I took this excerpt from Rubin’s op-ed trumps-incoherence-on-immigration-ought-to-embarrass-his-supporters:

 Too many talking heads on TV will try to keep a straight face and attempt to decipher Trump’s words, acting as though his remarks are the product of rational, informed thinking. Not enough reporters will refuse to accept the inevitable White House spin that Trump’s remarks somehow all make sense. Others will skip straight to process stories. (Maybe it’s clever politics! He’s reassuring his base! No, he means DACA figuratively, not literally!) Let’s get real. Other than a visceral distaste for Hispanic immigrants (and others from “shithole” countries, in Trump’s words) and a need to feed material to the white-grievance racket (e.g. Fox News, Breitbart, FAIR, anti-immigrant bloggers, etc.), Trump doesn’t much care what the current law is or what current conditions exist for immigrants. All he knows is that he blew the deal for the wall and will get blamed for DACA (which he repealed). Trump and his spokesmen should not get a free pass, the presumption of rationality, when the president sounds this uninformed and divorced from reality. Trump certainly is not entirely alone in his ignorance. How many other right-wing anti-immigrant (legal and illegal) provocateurs insist that immigrants are stealing jobs? The same people who are convinced that we are being overrun by murderers and drug dealers might want to consider what is going on in red America — where many members of Trump’s base actually live. Aside from having a very small percentage of immigrants, these areas have an acute labor shortage. 

In the last group of links under Broken System, I posted an excerpt here from trump-presidency-trump-cant-negotiate-his-way-out-of-a-paper-bag.  Many voted for him from his reputation as a successful businessman & great dealmaker.  But we have to ask ourselves, how can our Congress negotiate with a president who keeps changing his mind & policy positions?  And how can somebody be expected to strike the best deals when he doesn’t understand the details, intricacies & nuances of the issues he’s negotiating over?  He could lean on his internal experts, but he tends to depend more on the ridiculously extremist rants heard on Fox fake news.  Perhaps this explains why we’ve gotten no infrastructure bill, no DACA deal with a wall, no new gun laws & no deficit reduction initiatives, as we’ve only been saddled with a budget-busting tax cut relying on the folly of trickle down: