December 31, 2017





































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.

“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.

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?


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 17, 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.

December 14, 2017

Democrats winning from hatred of GOP business as usual

What initially appeared to be a topsy-turvy re-alignment election, where the Republican party would have become more populist and nationalist as it aimed to keep together the Trump coalition, has instead been hijacked by the standard policies of the interest groups that control the GOP.

Being a party in terminal decline, they have no results to showcase despite their control over the entire national government, and at best a widely hated tax cut bill.

Trump did not distinguish himself from the Republican retard show during the primaries by shouting about tax cuts, cutting social security and Medicare, and beefing up our military footprint around the world.

With nothing to satisfy the Trump coalition of populists and nationalists, and if anything only rejecting those voters' priorities while insulting them as a bunch of bigoted racists for wanting a decent standard of living for their fellow Americans, it comes as no surprise to see voters rejecting the GOP whenever they can.

In the early special elections, this total betrayal was not yet evident to everyone, and voters were willing to either give Republicans the benefit of the doubt, or were still in 2016 mode, full of Trumpian enthusiasm about making the GOP work for them for a change.

But especially since the last of the Trumpists were purged from the government by the Pentagon junta in August, which also saw a reversal of the America-first goal to GTFO of Afghanistan already, the administration and Congress have kicked it into high gear on governing as though this were the Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz presidency.

Voters have noticed, and they are not happy. Certainly the Trump voters are not satisfied with what has so far been delivered -- or not delivered -- but they can no longer count on independents and Democrat crossovers to save their ass. The GOP has burned all bridges with anyone who isn't a hardcore Republican partisan, and even that minuscule group is dissatisfied.

The rejection of Republicans can no longer be blamed on the race being held in a blue state like New Jersey or a purple swamp state like Virginia. Now one of the reddest states in the union has elected a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in a quarter of a century.

The common denominator is that these have been later races, after the public has given up hope on the GOP re-aligning itself to match the Trump campaign that won against all odds.

As the GOP goes even further into widely hated territory, like cutting away the social safety net programs, we can expect even greater rejection at the ballot box, including the 2018 midterms.

Do the Dems have what it takes to win those midterms? They won in Alabama not by putting up a cultural liberal of color who wants yuppie economics (Obama), but a conservative-to-moderate white dude running on reviving the New Deal populist programs that developed the Deep South out of its agricultural past.

Doug Jones was a staffer for the last Democrat to represent the state in the Senate, Howell Heflin, who was a conservative that fought for protectionist trade measures and consumer protection.

As long as the Democrats adhere to their recent string of wins by running moderate vanilla white guys (or gals) who don't want to cut the good stuff out of government, they can easily win against the Party of Stupid even in red states.

The Alabama election proved yet again that even red staters don't care that much about the culture war anymore. Remember, Trump dominated the Deep South in the GOP primaries -- not Lyin' Ted, with his Bible held high before he puts it down and then he lies.

Clueless observers keep referring to "the 10 Democrat Senators up for re-election in states that Trump won" -- it's too bad that Trump will not be running in any of those races. At least, not Trump the candidate of 2016. To the extent that he tethers his reputation to the GOP agenda, he will be on the ballot, but he will not perform as he did in 2016 when his reputation was burnished by disavowing the usual Republican crap.

No, it will be the results of GOP governance on the ballot. And at the current rate, we can eliminate Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania as toss-ups. Ohio is held by a trade hawk running against someone endorsed by the Club for Growth in the Rust Belt, so that's likely not going to change hands either. Florida is a swing state, even for Trump, so that's hardly in the lean-red category either. West Virginia has an old school Democrat who's been incumbent forever. Three of the others are in the Midwest (MO, IN, ND), where the Dems are not flaming liberals. Only one is in more solid red territory (MT).

These states in and around the Rust Belt were psychotic for the Trump campaign, not for the tax cuts and culture war distractions that are the standard fare from the GOP. If they are not given what Trump ran on, why would they reward the Republicans in Congress for sidelining the Trump agenda?

Then there are the vulnerable Republicans, which is really all of them at this point. None of them has stood out to defend Trump against the GOP leadership, the Deep State witch hunt, or anything else. Especially Corker and Flake -- their betrayal will dampen enthusiasm so much, it may not matter who their intended replacements are. Voters will just be sick of their party. And Heller was already vulnerable in blue-state Nevada.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Dems net 1 or 2 seats, resulting in an effectively divided or slightly Democrat-leaning Senate.

And you know what, populists? That's a good thing, not a bad thing. The Republicans have given us neither populism nor nationalism, have adamantly promised never to do so in the future, and have insulted us for demanding them. At least the Democrats will pass out some breadcrumbs on populism, and will deliver even more if we play hardball with them leading up to the elections.

"Gee, it would be a pity if we merely stayed home due to lack of enthusiasm... that might not do enough to swing the election your way. We could do even better and turn out for your party, if you were to offer us single-payer healthcare, break up a media monopoly, slam 35% tariffs on off-shored production, etc., while shutting the hell up about cultural liberal crap."

"And BTW if you try to impeach Trump, we reserve the right to storm your offices and put your necks in the guillotines."

Americans are rapidly getting past this partisan obsession about which team "puts points on the board". Especially the generations after the hyper-competitive Silents and Boomers, who retardedly turn every political topic into a pointless Super Bowl match. And what if the point just put on the board is going to make America worse? We don't want points at any cost.

If widespread disaffection with the GOP can produce wins for conservative-to-moderate lite populists in the Deep South, it can do so anywhere else.

It looked like the Trump election was going to re-make the Republican party, but perhaps it is going to re-make the Democrats instead. Hey, whoever wants to cater to our needs can have our vote -- we don't care which team it is.

The only bumps along that road will be the clueless partisans on the Democrat side, who will read into these red-state victories that there's a secret underground army of soy-swilling liberal homosexuals and minorities who have finally decided to show up like a deus ex machina. Sorry liberals: you only win by adding moderates and conservatives to your side, or depressing their turnout for the other side (if their side doesn't already depress its own turnout).

Democrats can only retake the Senate by running more Howell Heflins, not Jon Ossoffs. Steelworkers, not Starbucks.

If Democrats manage to decouple their liberal cultural crap from progressive economics, the sky's the limit.

December 11, 2017

Unlike GOP, Dems yielding somewhat to their insurgency

As we near the end of the first year for the GOP administration and GOP control of Congress, the "hostile takeover" of the party by the Trump insurgents has not materialized. Maybe sometime within the next three years, they will relent, but for now they show no signs of compromising with their anti-Establishment populists and nationalists.

It's not simply that the Trump revolution hasn't taken over the GOP agenda 100% -- we know change doesn't happen that fast. But the GOP hasn't done anything to appease us, and are continuing to implement the same ol' Republican BS that we voted against during their own party's primary, where we whooped Lyin' Ted by 20 points, Boy Wonder by 25 points, and everyone else by even yuger margins.

The GOP is a party intent on blowing up their own headquarters rather than allow it to fall to a hostile takeover by the Trump legions. OK, blow it up, and we'll bulldoze the rubble and build a new second party over the foundations of the old one. Not exactly Plan A, but we can go with Plan B as well.

For some perspective on what non-suicidal parties look like, let's see what the Democrats have been up to after getting shut out of all branches of government, and subject to ever greater cries for radical change coming from the Bernie revolution.

They formed a Unity Reform Commission to address how rigged the Democrat primary system is against insurgent candidates. The URC has recommended slashing the number of superdelegates by 60% and making them bound instead of unbound. That still has to be voted on by the full DNC, along with other potential changes to make the primary process easier to participate in.

The GOP primary was just as rigged, only it was through a subtler form of delegate theft, threats to re-write the rules, etc., in order to block an insurgent like Trump and choose some party-approved puppet through a contested convention. Party Chairman Reince Priebus kept making these threats through late April, long after it was clear Trump would win the nomination among voters -- and by a landslide.

The GOP also deliberately fielded over a dozen candidates in order to break up support for everyone but the anointed one -- supposedly Jeb Bush, but as it turned out, Donald Trump.

And has the RNC formed a unity commission with Trump supporters to hammer out changes to the nomination process, to prevent these sabotages from happening again? Nope.

When it comes to throwing dead weight people overboard, the Democrats for the most part have shut out the Clintons and the broader Clinton world from the party. The Bernie people were already opposed to the Clintons for ideological reasons, but they're getting shoved out also by the Obama camp, who are closer in policy to the Clintons but who are at war with them for control of the Establishment wing of the party.

Have the Republicans as a whole -- politicians, media figures, donors, etc. -- made a decisive break with the Bushes or the Romneys? No: Romney is angling for a Utah Senate seat if the elderly Hatch retires, and from there a presidential run again. So far it is Trump himself who is trying to woo Hatch into staying in office, rather than 2/3 of the GOP telling Romney to go get lost. Plus his niece is the head of the RNC; even if she's better than her uncle, it shows that their clan is still in power in the party.

And the Bushes and the broader Bush network have not been disavowed and thrown under the bus by another Establishment camp like the Romneys or the Kochs or the whoevers. It's only the dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporters who want to see the Bushes and their cronies sent into exile -- and we are not getting help from any Establishment faction like the Bernie people are receiving from the Obama camp, in tossing out the Clinton camp.

The various elite GOP camps are all united in not wanting the Trump camp to gain an inch more of territory within the party, even if one elite camp were to gain at the expense of a rival elite camp.

Donna Brazile, from the Obama camp, has not only thrown the Clintons under the bus -- she wrote a tell-all campaign book about it, and has done long interviews with Bernie-supporting reporters like Nomiki Konst for Bernie-supporting media outlets like The Young Turks.

Where is Reince Priebus' tell-all book that throws the Bushes or the Romneys under the bus, in order to boost his own Wisconsin Mafia camp? Where is he telling that story and ceding ground to Trump-supporting reporters like Roger Stone for Trump-supporting outlets like Infowars?

On policy, the Democrats could have done the easy thing and just go into reactionary mode -- preserve what we already have won from the GOP attempts to roll it back. And yet 17 members of the Democrat caucus in the Senate -- Bernie and 16 Dems -- have signed onto single-payer healthcare. Not a far-left change -- every other modern country has it -- but still a fundamental change to the American system of getting raped to death by healthcare monopolies (HMOs, pharma, etc.). Much more of a change than Obamacare, which did not even offer a public option to buy into a single-payer system.

Where in the world is the GOP counterpart to this? Something that GOP legislators normally wuss out on, but have decided to compromise with the insurgents of their party and acknowledge which way the winds are blowing within their party and the nation? Where are the 18 GOP Senators who want to slash legal immigration numbers, a la the RAISE Act? Or any big change on immigration, for that matter?

In fact, there are just 2 Senators supporting it, Cotton and Perdue. This is even more of a slam-dunk policy for Republican voters than single-payer healthcare is for Democrat voters. But the GOP refuses to serve its customers -- when it isn't trotting out politicians reviled by the party's own voters, like George W. Bush, who proceed to call them all bigots for voting for change.

Democrats could have played it safe and made identity politics the basis for their attack on the Republican government, but they have largely opted for the critique that their insurgents would resonate with -- based on class and economics, rather than race, gender, and gayness.

Where are the Republican politicians who are attacking Democrats for not being populist enough or nationalist enough, to make their partisan attacks resonate with their own voters? Instead they are doing just the opposite -- slamming Democrats for not caring enough about wealthy people and gigantic corporations ("job creators" AKA slave drivers), and for not letting America take on a greater "role in the world" (globalism, not nationalism).

And as I reviewed here, the insurgent Dems like Bernie and his people are not only trying to understand the insurgents of the other side (us), they are holding rallies to try to win them over by acknowledging their concerns and treating them seriously. Bernie alone is doing more to talk to Trump voters about populist policies than any of the Republicans are -- including Trump himself, unfortunately, who has decided (hopefully just for the time being) to be the public face of the corporate elitist agenda of the GOP.

Obviously Bernie is not sincerely trying to convert them away from nationalism, but he is finding common ground on populism and trying to get something done on this overlap area. I've noticed a similar postmortem on 2016 from far-left revolutionary types like Michael Albert from ZNet -- the white working class wanted populism, and Trump was preaching it more credibly than Clinton was. Trump voters aren't evil racists, and we need to reach out to them sincerely and win them back to not voting Republican.

The GOP is not reaching out to the white working class who voted Trump for populism and nationalism, but nor are they trying to win over people who voted for the other party. At best, they're trying to assuage some of the McCain / Romney voters who defected to Clinton -- yuppie scum who prevented the party from winning either of those elections, and who it turned out were not crucial to winning the 2016 election either. Some group to try to win back.

They should be saying, "Why did only 12% of Bernie voters go for the GOP in the general? It should be 25% next time." And then go about trying to persuade these populists who voted Democrat that the GOP was truly, honestly in a re-alignment process toward populism and away from corporate elitism. Give them something concrete to point to from Congress or the executive branch.

But the Republicans are not trying to win over even more Bernie voters -- probably the craziest idea for party growth, in their minds. And yet 12% of Bernie primary voters chose Trump, vs. only 2% of Hillary primary voters. That's obviously where the growth potential is for the GOP, not the tiny handful of yuppie Hillary supporters who might switch if promised a big enough tax cut.

But bringing in more and more Bernie supporters would be worse than letting the Trump legions take over the GOP. The GOP does not want to become influential, let alone wield power -- they want to preserve the sanctity of their failed and rejected corporate globalist agenda.

This is not even to speak of the run-of-the-mill program of greater checks-and-balances on the Democrat side. There are numerous Democrat Congressmen who want to cut down to size the primary power faction that controls their own party -- Wall Street banks. And who form and staff new institutions to work toward that end, like Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Where are all of those Republicans who want to cut down to size their own party's primary power faction, the Pentagon? Rand Paul, and that's about it. And he hasn't created and staffed an agency that works to rein in the excesses of imperial expansion from the military brass.

It's not to say that the Democrats are anti-Wall Street -- they are controlled by Wall Street, but they at least push back somewhat, and allow more open discussion about what their controllers do wrong. You do not see any pushback, even rhetorically, against the imperialist Pentagon by Republicans.

The GOP is so opposed to wielding power when they supposedly have it, that they will not even attack the other party's institutions -- the banks, the internet tech companies, the media (other than rhetorically), the higher ed bubble and university administrators, and so on. They're too busy fighting their opposition on the other side of the globe. "America last", or maybe "America whenever we get around to it".

Lastly, it is Republicans who are trying to drive the insurgent choice of the people out of office. All chairs of the relevant committees in the Russia witch hunt are Republicans, since they control both houses of Congress. All of the heads of the relevant agencies are Republicans, like Sessions and the de facto AG Rosenstein at the DoJ. Comey and Mueller are both Republicans, and we see how well they're ceding ground to the Trumpian insurgency.

We can't compare that to how a Democrat insurgent like Bernie would be treated if he had been elected President. I'm sure he too would be subject to sabotage by leaders of his own party -- but I doubt it would rise to the level of trying to railroad him out of office, after purging every one of his populist appointees from the Cabinet. Maybe the Democrat power elites would only purge half of his populist appointees, and would not hold impeachment dangling over his head like the sword of Damocles.

The Democrats are not more moral or democratically inclined. They are simply willing to negotiate the terms of their surrender if it becomes clear they are losing, so they can save their own skins as much as possible. They are pragmatic and opportunistic. The Republicans are also not moral or democratically inclined -- but they're not even willing to negotiate when their Establishment agenda has gotten absolutely creamed in back-to-back elections (GOP primary and general from 2016). They are puritanical and dogmatic, hell-bent on self-destruction rather than serve another master.

So be it, then. In the meantime, populists who voted Trump should try to help the Bernie people take over the Democrat party and get some real results there. They're not going to give us a 50% reduction in legal immigration, or deport 10 million illegals -- but then neither is the GOP. We were hoping they would, but the verdict has come in, and they will not. Nationalism will have to be the basis of a new second party after we repeal-and-replace the GOP.

December 6, 2017
























December 5, 2017

Non-reformist reforms for Trumpism

As the populist-nationalist insurgency attempts to re-align the Republican party, or to repeal and replace it if re-alignment fails, we need a simple rule-of-thumb for judging whether a particular policy is worth supporting, or whether it should be altered to better suit our goals.

Since we are aiming at taking the GOP and the nation as a whole in an entirely different direction from where we're currently heading, we need to be wary of little changes that don't allow further changes to be built on top of them. That would be like laying a few stones for a bridge that needs to cross a mile-long chasm.

We understand that the bridge won't be built in a day, all at once -- but the process of laying stones must allow further stones to be laid, all of them connected eventually into a single cohesive bridge. A process that slows or halts its own growth will never get completed -- and half a bridge only leaves us right where we already are.

The Left gets this better than the Right, which has always had a problem with "the vision thing" and taking short-term actions with a long-term strategy in mind. *

Fortunately, that means the Left has already figured out a lot of the strategy stuff in general and neutral terms -- the Right only has to substitute their own goals into the framework instead of Leftist goals.

The Leftist social philosopher Andre Gorz came up with the phrase "non-reformist reform" to distinguish between reforms that would ultimately leave the status quo in place vs. those that would build and build toward altering the status quo at a fundamental level. That means that the same policy could be pursued in a reformist way, where it is not going to lead to larger and more sweeping changes, or in a non-reformist way, where it does lead to fundamental changes.

For example, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour -- if the campaign doesn't address why wages are so low to begin with, and how much wealth there is to go around at the top, merely raising the minimum wage will leave those forces in place and prevent fundamental change, which aims for $15 an hour wages without having to rely on minimum wage laws.

The campaign could point out how wages are low because American workers are competing with lower-wage workers in foreign countries (off-shoring), or those same people brought here as immigrants (legally or illegally). After slashing labor costs by pitting American vs. foreign workers, the stockholders of these companies reap the benefits in the form of higher profits. This is one of the main drivers of inequality.

Moreover, the rich are not getting richer because they invented some useful new thing, or have improved the production process in some ingenious new way. They've simply replaced higher-paid workers with lower-paid workers -- gee, it takes a real genius to come up with that business model. It involved no ingenuity, creativity, risk, or utility to others -- it only required sociopathy from those making the hiring-and-firing decisions.

Allowing their profits to soar, and those of American workers to plummet, from this process of off-shoring and immigration, is to reward sociopathy -- not to reward risk-taking or other entrepreneurial values.

Fighting for a higher minimum wage with this framework in mind would lead to calls for a return of jobs and industries that have been off-shored, as well as an end to immigrant labor (legal or illegal). That is a long-term vision that would introduce fundamental changes in the American economy, where cheap foreigners are no longer included as a structural release valve for the wages that the stockholders have to pay workers.

American workers would earn higher wages -- without needing a minimum wage law -- a new class of jobs would be introduced back into the American economy (manufacturing especially), and corporate sociopathy would be stigmatized to the point where managers fear the wrath of the mob, and don't think about resorting to cheap labor as their Plan A for profits. Instead, they would have to invent new useful things, or find more ingenious ways to do existing tasks than their competitors.

Of course, there's always the question of how far the fundamental change is intended to go. Even among the Leftists debating these non-reformist reforms, some groups may have wanted social democracy like they used to have in Scandinavia, others may have wanted to do away with private ownership of capital, others may have wanted public ownership plus a central planning board instead of a market, and so on and so forth.

The point was not to debate how revolutionary they were -- they already understood that some were more so than others -- but to think about how to achieve their ultimate goals, regardless of how far out-there they were compared to other Leftists.

Turning now to the Trumpist movement for populism and nationalism, we can see that most of the changes made since the transfer of control from the Democrat to the GOP administrations have mainly served to preserve or even enhance the status quo, and that the Trump movement must make more conscious efforts to re-direct any major policy in the populist or nationalist direction.

The GOP healthcare bill was clearly not going to steer healthcare in a more populist or nationalist direction. They did not seek to lower drug prices by negotiating with the drug monopolies, let alone a public option or single-payer that would have given the people even more leverage over the HMO and drug elites. Nor did they seek to cut off immigrants from government-funded healthcare programs.

A non-reformist reform in healthcare would have been, "Medicare for all, except those who gotta go back". That's what Trump meant during his campaign: "We have to take care of our people," which would have been a fundamental change to the reigning GOP values about "let everyone fend for themselves, except for the well-connected who can hijack the government for their own purposes".

The GOP tax bill shows the same intensification of the status quo, especially if they move onto gutting the social safety net afterwards under the pretense of controlling the debt explosion due to tax cuts. It is not punishing the elites who have driven our country over a cliff, nor those who expand globally at the expense of domestic workers.

A non-reformist reform in tax reform would have been, "You'll get your corporate income tax cut once 90% of your production is done here in America" or "We'll give you income tax cuts, but also 35% tariffs on off-shored production" to reward only those stockholders that are pro-American rather than amoral globalists. That would shift the reward structure from rewarding profits per se, no matter how sociopathic and society-wrecking the process was for earning those profits, to rewarding profits that came from pro-American and society-enhancing activities.

On to matters of nationalism, the immigration policies have so far preserved the status quo as well. The tiny uptick in deportations from within the interior are a welcome change, but will not come anywhere close to expelling the 10-20 million illegals here (off by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, IIRC). A tiny uptick leaves the big picture in place -- you can illegally enter the United States, and the overwhelming odds are that you will never be deported. And everything that follows from that demographic shift -- lower wages, higher cost of living, fragmented culture, lower trust among diverse groups, etc.

A non-reformist reform in immigration would be to step up the rate of deportations so that at least 10 million illegals could be cleared out by the end of eight years. That's 1.25 million per year, which is what the Eisenhower administration managed to do during Operation Wetback in the 1950s, only we would need to sustain that rate for eight years. This would be paired with a drastic decrease in legal immigration, a la the RAISE Act (which is currently dead in the water even among GOP politicians), to keep our deportations from being canceled out by new arrivals.

And the rationale would be improving the standard of living for the American working and middle classes (higher wages, lower cost of living), not just protecting us from gangs like MS-13. Framing the immigration battle as primarily about violent crime and drugs would leave the GOP orthodoxy in place.

When the DACA people get their amnesty, a non-reformist reform would be to tie it to deporting an even greater number of illegals. Say, once 10 million illegals have been certifiably deported, then and only then will we give the DACA people amnesty. Giving them amnesty before collecting an equal or larger concession vis-a-vis immigration would be a movement-halting decision.

Nationalism in foreign policy has had the worst fate, since most people consider it boring and out-of-sight out-of-mind. But we've wasted trillions of dollars that could have been better spent on Americans and America, or not borrowed to begin with. And all in order to maintain our military presence in Germany, South Korea, and Japan long after the threat of Communist expansion has ceased to exist.

Indeed, rather than moving to "re-jigger NATO" away from Cold War concerns and toward the present and growing threat of radical Islam, we have admitted a new member from Eastern Europe (Montenegro), and are listening to the aspirations of others surrounding Russia (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Georgia -- where the NATO-led uprising by Saakashvili in 2008 was easily put down by Russia). We are not moving to expel Turkey for supporting the political version of radical Islam (Muslim Brotherhood), let alone are we moving to bring in Russia -- the main force in thwarting jihadism in the Middle East, with its decisive intervention in the Syrian War.

We have only ramped up our commitment to the jihadist kingdoms who are the source of radical Islam as an ideology, and as a militia movement -- mainly Saudi Arabia, but also Qatar and the UAE. We have taken stronger measures against the secular nationalist leaders in the Middle East, such as Assad, and we are building toward a major confrontation with the non-jihadist nation of Iran.

Non-reformist reforms in foreign policy would be to draw down our presence in Germany and Eastern Europe, to ease off of Russia -- or to jump right to admitting Russia into NATO. We have to get along with Russia in order to beat back radical Islam. The Eastern European countries already in NATO would not serve to put pressure on Russia, but to halt the flow of Muslim migrants coming through Southeastern Europe (Greece especially). That would also provide the basis for kicking out Turkey, who is funneling Muslims into Europe like there's no tomorrow.

We could also draw dawn our presence in South Korea and Japan, which are more than capable of defending themselves against North Korea. And the main reason that NK developed nukes was to deter the US from attacking it preemptively, not to take over SK or Japan.

These moves out of Eastern Europe and East Asia would build toward the fundamental change of using the military for successful defense of the homeland, not failed imperial expansion. Partnering with Russia against radical Islam would provide the basis for shifting away from our alliance with Saudi Arabia.

"Sorry haters, but getting along with a nuclear superpower is more important for our national security than getting along with a bunch of fanatic Muslims who blew us up on September 11th and still have not paid the price for it."

So no matter how current events transpire, we should keep an eye more on the trajectory rather than isolated snapshots. Where have things been leading to so far, and where do they appear to be leading based on the latest events? We want our changes to be non-reformist reforms, not just feel-good isolated incidents that ultimately lead nowhere, let alone changes for the worse in the current direction.

* This is because liberals are adapted to K-selected environments, where population density is high, the niche is near saturation, and resources per capita are stretched thin. Conservatives are adapted to r-selected environments, where population density is low, the niche has just opened up and has plenty of room for growth, and resources per capita are abundant. Naturally, those who face grim prospects are going to have to be better at long-term planning than those who live in a world of seemingly boundless low-lying fruit.

The level of social complexity is also dramatically different, with liberals coming from highly complex social units. Conservatives have rarely had to face survival in such highly complex environments, so how can they be expected to appreciate how they work, let alone try to successfully manage them?

In niches marked by abundance, the highest social unit is the extended family clan. So conservatives can understand politics where the individual, family, and clan are actors -- but not where larger and more complex groups are actors, such as Wall Street or the Pentagon, or the party coalitions of (Wall St + Silicon Valley + media) and (Pentagon + Energy + Agribusiness).

December 4, 2017

Bernie de-converting Obama-Trump voters over GOP BS

The Democrat party may be out of touch, but it is not suicidal, and has spent the year since Trump's upset victory trying to improve their electoral prospects.

They've figured out that the Clintons are dead weight and chucked them overboard, while retaining the Obama camp who are less hated but still about as neoliberal.

They've left the Russia witch hunt mostly to their lackeys in the media, since the voters they need to win over don't believe the hysteria (but the hysteria does draw in the small niche of cable news addicts).

And most importantly, they've made their opposition based mainly on class and economic issues, rather than scream "racist sexist homophobe" all day long. They tried that early on with the pussy hat march, the "not wanting to get blown up by radical Muslims makes you an Islamophobe" campaign during the travel ban -- but it didn't work. They've learned and switched to economic issues.

Those are the issues that Trump defeated them on during the campaign, but which have been hijacked by the typical Republican bullshit once the GOP took over the executive branch, combined with their control of Congress.

Trump ran on delivering the best of both worlds for independent voters -- populist on economics, nationalist on culture, immigration, and foreign policy. The Pentagon junta has purged the nationalists out of the government, beginning with Flynn and ending with Bannon, so there goes that plank of the Trumpist platform for the time being. But of course the Democrats are not about to challenge the Trump administration on not being sufficiently nationalist.

That leaves the populist themes that have been contradicted by the standard GOP playbook of inflating bubbles for the sectors that control their party (military, agriculture, energy), cutting taxes on the rich and corporations, and slashing spending on the social safety net.

Trump ran on preserving the social safety net against the usual Republican attempts to destroy it, pairing tax cuts with tax hikes in the form of big fat tariffs that would penalize companies that have replaced American workers with foreign workers, and drawing down military spending by shrinking our global footprint where it is no longer useful (Germany, South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan) and negotiating down the prices from the military-industrial complex. *

That is what won over enough Obama voters in enough states to win the Electoral College. The nationalist, America-first themes won over Republican primary voters tired of globalism, but the general election was mostly about populism.

When these voters see what is going on during the Trump administration, they're going to be less enthusiastic the next time around and may completely ditch the GOP in 2020. Michigan was already a razor-thin win, and Minnesota (Trump + third-party spoiler), Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania were not much wider. Forget flipping Maine. Ohio, Iowa, and North Carolina look safer, though Florida will still be a toss-up (not that populism will help there -- it is a destination for individualist yuppie transplants).

If Democrats claw back Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, they will win with 278 votes in 2020.

Against that background, they are sending Bernie Sanders out to hold rallies in Rust Belt states to try to win back the Trump voters who voted on class issues, by pointing out how opposite the results have been from what he campaigned on.

And he's not doing a bad job -- too early to tell how many he'll win back, but it's not just mindless boo-ing Trump, slandering Trump voters as bigots like George W. Bush did, or foaming at the mouth about Russia like a liberal media moron.

Here are videos of the same speech in Dayton, OH (jump to 49:00) and Reading, PA (53:00). Trump won both counties. Dayton's county had not voted red since 1988, although Reading's county had voted Obama '08 and Romney '12.

Bernie starts off saying he sympathizes with Trump voters, says their pain is real, they're not racists, and what Trump promised during the campaign were good things -- healthcare for all, no cutting the social safety net, Drain the Swamp, drug companies are ripping us off, trade deals should bring back manufacturing jobs, etc.

He tells the few boo-ers in the audience not to boo Trump voters or the issues that Trump ran on. (His audience at rallies are mostly partisan retards who can only voice approval for universal healthcare if Bernie rather than Trump is promoting it.)

Then he lists the various ways in which the agenda being pursued so far contradicts what Trump ran on, and calls on Trump to promise to veto any bill that betrays his promises from the campaign regarding the social safety net, drug prices, etc.

He's insightful and pragmatic enough to put most of the blame on Congressional Republicans, who everybody hates and who deserve the blame for where things have gone so far. But he doesn't quite go as far as the truth, to portray Trump as being isolated and held hostage by "his own" party, which would make Trump more sympathetic, and perhaps antagonize Trump voters into a bitter GOP primary campaign rather than just switching over to Bernie-style Democrats.

It would be the most devastating blow he could deliver to the opposition party -- "I understand where you were coming from, but you voted for Trump and wound up with the GOP instead." As it is, he portrays Trump as having lied and deceived voters during the campaign. Not believable, given the immense punishment he took and the sacrifices he made without any guarantee of victory.

A more crippling frame would be that Trump intended to do everything he said during the campaign, but that one man -- and an outsider at that -- was not enough to overcome the machinery of the GOP while in office. Maybe that doesn't win over his voters to Democrats, maybe it just drives the Republicans back into civil war. Either way, that's the way he should be framing it.

In these social media videos that edit together the sound bites from the rallies, the Bernie team even uses Trump's own TV appearances from the campaign to emphasize what he ran on. I think that has the effect of neutering the wrong claims of Trump being a deceiver -- we can tell from his voice and face that he sincerely wants to do what he's saying.

However we have to hold the GOP's feet to the fire, we have to do it. And Trump's feet, to the extent that he has chosen to hitch his wagon to the falling star of Republicanism. Backing away from "let's let Assad stay in power" we can understand -- the Pentagon elites and CIA could have threatened to assassinate his family and have the IRS seize his family's wealth.

But they're not literally holding him hostage over tax cuts for the rich and destroying Medicare. He has more wiggle room there, and should distance himself as far as possible from austerity measures.

It's time for some kind of campaign about "Trump voters against GOP economics". It would be best to partner with the Bernie people, since they are organized and we are not, and since it would emphasize the bipartisan support for the social safety net, protectionist trade deals, and universal healthcare among citizens (if not among the elites).

We should set aside the fact that they are not America-firsters -- because neither is the GOP, and Trump's "own party" has taken extreme measures to railroad the Trumpian nationalists out of the government. If both parties are globalist for the time being, we might as well strategically ally with the one that is more open to populism than corporate elitism, while trying to build a better America-first party to repeal-and-replace the Republican party.

* Remember when, during the transition and pre-Pentagon coup, Trump negotiated down $600 million from the F-35 contract going to Lockheed Martin? He must have gotten a talking to by the military elite, and has not tried to get more bang for the buck on military equipment ever since. Indeed, Congress delivered an even larger defense budget than what Trump had asked for.

December 1, 2017

Steinle's killer let in by Reagan / Bush, supported by GOP employers

In all of the partisan shrieking about Kate Steinle's murder, it has escaped everyone's notice that her killer was let into the country by a Republican President, deported more often by Democrat than by Republican Presidents afterward, and was economically supported by employers in sectors that control the GOP rather than the Democrat party.

Here is an LA Times article from 2015, when the murder was still fresh, with as much biographical information on Jose Garcia Zarate as I've been able to find on the internet. He was illegally brought over the Mexican border sometime before 1991, as a juvenile (a DREAMer!), and presumably after 1981 -- otherwise he would've been covered by the 1986 amnesty. That means it was either Reagan or Bush Sr. who let him in.

We keep hearing that he was "deported 5 times" -- three times under Clinton (in '94, '97, and '98), once by Bush Jr. (in '03), and finally by Obama (in '09). During the 25 years he was here from his first red flag -- a drug conviction in 1991 -- to 2015 when he killed Steinle, Democrats were President for 3/5 of the time. Yet they executed 4/5 of his deportations.

Hardly asleep at the wheel -- if anything, that would have been the Bush Jr. administration, or the Reagan / Bush team for letting him in way back when (and for issuing the amnesty that triggered further illegal immigration from Mexico, including Zarate's parents).

How did he earn a living here in El Norte? The only info I can find is from the LAT article, which describes him as having been "an itinerant laborer in four states". He came through Texas and Arizona, presumably California is in there, and some other state in the Southwest. That is mostly red state country.

And in which sectors of the economy does an "itinerant laborer" work? Probably not those that make up the Democrat coalition of informational sector industries -- finance, tech, and media -- nor presumably from lesser members of their coalition like the education sector or any labor union (scab labor go home). Those sectors, especially the major members, have hardly any jobs at all, and they all require a verbal person who speaks English.

No, we can be sure he was hired by Republican material sectors -- agriculture, "small business" (some shitty food shack in a suburban strip center), union-busting contractors, etc.

Democrat sectors of the economy are not labor-intensive and do not rely on cheap labor to boost profits. GOP sectors are labor-intensive, and do rely on cheap labor. Therefore, that's who hired him and everyone else like him -- not the local public school, unionized factory, bank, newspaper, web programmer, or other Democrat workplace. Not necessarily because Democrats are more moral or civic-minded, but because their material interests do not benefit from cheap labor that speaks no English.

Without the Republican sectors turning to cheap labor to boost their profits, Zarate and all the other itinerant laborers would never have been able to earn a living here, and would not have been induced to immigrate here with the hopes of stealing a labor-intensive job.

"But they would've received welfare" is a lame excuse to try to pin this back on Democrats. Republicans have already gutted welfare so that it cannot support someone who has to pay American prices for housing, food, etc. Immigrants may collect welfare, but that does not sustain them -- they do that by stealing jobs from Americans in labor-intensive sectors.

The same goes for blaming sanctuary city policies on Democrats. They flourished during all eight years of Bush Jr's presidency, and what the hell did his administration ever do about it? They were more lenient than the Clinton administration on illegals.

And now that the GOP controls the executive branch again, where the hell is the destruction of these sanctuary policies? Remember that pseudo-AG Sessions' plan to "de-fund" sanctuary cities only amounted to withholding one-half of 1% of their federal funding! Those cities must be shaking in their boots at these typical Republican levels of grandstanding.

Democrats take the blame for sanctuary city policies to the extent that they are an urban-oriented party that controls the large cities where these policies are enforced. But that doesn't let the state and federal GOP off the hook -- they should have crippled the mayors and police chiefs in these cities decades ago. Send in the federal military like Eisenhower did to clear out the illegals -- somehow I don't think the San Francisco Police Department is going to win a fight against the US Army, especially when they're defying federal immigration laws.

All the Republicans do is whine about sanctuary cities to win over nationalist voters, without doing anything about them in order to appease the cheap labor-seeking economic sectors that control their party.

And of course today's globalist military elites would never dream of sending in the troops to kick foreign invaders out of our country -- why, those illegals may end up serving in our military like any other interchangeable cog residing on our magic American soil, no matter where they came from!

Like the other labor-intensive sectors, the military / police / etc. expand their operations only when they get more bodies into their workforce. And if American bodies are unwilling -- wages are too low on farms, don't want to risk death just to defend jihadist kingdoms -- then they have no trouble bringing in foreign bodies to take their place.

Degenerate empires have a knack for relying on foreign mercenaries, whether hired abroad or imported as immigrants. Nothing could go wrong from the Roman army becoming staffed entirely by Germanic tribesmen -- could it?

So let's cut the crap about blaming the urban death and decay wrought by immigrants on municipal-level Democrats, when state and national-level Republicans have refused to rein in any of it whenever they have had control over the executive branch. That's what national-level stewards are supposed to do -- swoop in when there's a failure at a lower level. But no, they'd rather fiddle while Rome burns, and by the way collect higher profits from all the cheap labor that these immigrants bring to GOP economic sectors.

When it comes to crime prevention and law enforcement, Democrats are like the clueless child saying "I'll do whatever I want, I don't have to follow your rules, DAD." Yeah, well where are that child's parents, the supposedly more mature and disciplinarian party when it comes to crime?

The Republican party is 100% OK with immigrants raising crime rates -- not only because they're trading that in exchange for cheap labor and higher profits, but because they won't bear any of the costs. Republican elites may rely on cheap laborers from the city, but they live in the suburbs. When their day laborers go driving drunk around their own neighborhood, or shoot up pedestrians at their local convenience store, that will be urban Democrat residents paying the cost -- not suburban or rural Republicans.

As in every other case that angers nationalists, this comes down to "I'm actually more disappointed in the Republicans," as Trump kept saying during the campaign. In order for the nationalist movement to grow, the Republican party must shrink.