Total Household Debt as reported by the New York Fed is at record levels.
Earlier this month, General Motors shut down its plant in Lordstown Ohio. Three more of their plants in the US are to be shut down over the next year.
Some of GM’s former employees will be able to transfer but the others are doomed to lower paying jobs. And of course those communities can not transfer, so they will have to cut spending or raise taxes. But those communities should take heart, this could improve the economic situation for Mexico’s maquiladoras.
Bloomberg is reporting that Fed Chairman Powell is signaling a long pause in rate increases. It seems that the chairman is looking for higher inflation. But the CPI stats have had much of reality removed from them, or should I say ‘ hedonically improved’ from them. A search for inflation there is doomed to disappointment. Perhaps he should carry a lantern.
In that same Bloomberg article we find “Policy makers appear to have cooled on the notion of any meaningful, lasting impact from last year’s tax reforms and instead project a return to trend growth, a stabilization of the unemployment rate and little pickup in price pressures. “
I am tempted to call the latest bit of Republican economic wizardry ‘the little tax cut that couldn’t’. But that would imply that there were ‘little tax cuts that could’. I have not had any experience with those.
So here we stand. The Effective Fed Funds Rate is currently at 2.4% versus the 5.26% in June 2007, about five months before the last recession began. And the Federal Reserve is afraid of any further increase in the near future.
We are in purgatory, paying for our economic sins of the last 25 years. And neither political party is willing to commit to any meaningful reform of US free trade policy. They continue to standpat!
The party of Trump must be getting worried about the growing movement to defang the useless Electoral College. This morning I found two Federalist op-ed pieces. One was posted on msn.com:
Both are evidence of a shockingly incomplete knowledge of history as well as an inability to understand simple arithmetic.
The very fact that the majority wants majoritarianism is why the Electoral College exists in the first place. Otherwise, three cities in the United States would decide the fate of the entire country, and a charismatic smooth-talker would eventually turn into Caesar.
As it happens, during the early years of the Republic, the Presidency was dominated by Virginia and Ohio, so apparently the goal of spreading the influence of the Presidency across the country didn’t work out so well.
Having read the history of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, and being well versed on the ongoing chaos of Europe, they understood that any project that guarantees liberal instincts need to be saved from its universalist extreme tendencies that eventually cause destruction.
I’ve always wondered why Federalist types have such a pathetic understanding of Roman history. I’m not aware of any historian who would regard the Roman Republic as being afflicted by “liberal instincts.” Apparently Caesar, Crassus and Pompey were closet left wingers fighting against elites. Right.
It gets worse. The recycled Sep 2016 op-ed tells us that:
If a president is elected by a simple majority of votes, a candidate who is wildly popular in one region (e.g., Ted Cruz in Texas, Mitt Romney in Utah) can ignore smaller regions and campaign only where large majorities are possible. Or a candidate who kills in California and New York can write off “flyover country” completely.
If this strikes you as arithmetically challenged, you’d be right. It’s got things exactly backwards. Electing a President by the popular vote encourages a candidate to go after the most votes irrespective of the geographic location. Writing off a hard-to-win state would not make any sense. It’s the Electoral College system that ensure candidates only focus on a dozen or so states that will matter in November.
Plato’s “Republic” heavily influenced Madison and the other framers to devise a Constitution that protected the minority. Plato held that the ideal, i.e., just, form of government was one in which power was shared correctly between workers, warriors, and rulers. Madison held that the ideal, i.e., American, form of government was one in which power was shared correctly between judges, lawmakers, and rulers.
Now I’ve read Plato’s “Republic” many times, and I can’t say that I’ve ever come away with that interpretation. This is sheer nonsense. There was no sharing of political power in Plato’s “Republic.” The artisan class did what it did an nothing more. The guardian class did its thing and nothing more. The philosopher kings alone ruled the Republic, and they ruled it for the enlightenment of philosophers. Plato’s idea of justice was that each element of the Republic kept to its own sphere.
The Electoral College was a disaster right out of the gate; hence we got the 12th Amendment. The Founders were not gods. They made plenty of mistakes. The gave us slavery. They also gave us a federalist style government in which people mattered less than the knitting together of otherwise autonomous mini-republics called states. The problem with the Electoral College isn’t just that it gives us undemocratic results; it’s that it gives voting rights to an abstract political entity called a state equal status with the votes of living humans.
“Despite the fact that almost no one has yet read the Mueller report, after it was announced that no further indictments would be filed as a result of its findings, some Republicans, including President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, took a victory lap. This “marks the end of the Mueller investigation,” Giuliani told Fox News, before firing off tweets demanding apologies from those who had previously accused Trump of colluding with Russia. But Fox’s Chris Wallace was quick to point out that such celebrations are extremely premature.
For one, while the fact that no more charges will be brought as the result of Mueller’s investigation does let figures like Don Jr. off of this particular hook, it doesn’t mean very much when it comes to the president himself. The Department of Justice has said that it will not indict a sitting president even if he appears to have committed crimes, so the fact that Trump will not be indicted in no way suggests that the report vindicates him.
“To say that somehow this clears the president seems like the height of rushing to judgment,” said Wallace. He also explained that based on the results of the Mueller report, Congress will determine whether or not to impeach Trump.”
Personally, I believe that if the Report is not made public, the House needs to impeach trump. Course, I am long past convinced there was a conspiracy with the trump campaign, and have already seen trump twice plead guilty to obstruction of justice(the second time while handing classified information to a couple of russians in the oval office.
And one more thing.
“Read again, especially, Jackson’s gutting of the now-familiar “no collusion” misdirection that Manafort’s lawyers tried to pull on her prior to sentencing on Wednesday. From the Washington Post:
“The ‘no collusion’ refrain that runs through the entire defense memorandum is unrelated to matters at hand,” she said. “The ‘no collusion’ mantra is simply a non sequitur. The ‘no collusion’ mantra is also not accurate, because the investigation is still ongoing.”
This strategy by the defense was universally identified as a sub rosa plea for a pardon from Manafort’s most prominent former North American client. And Jackson’s stern rebuke became especially piquant given the fact that Manafort’s lawyer, Kevin Downing, came out of the courthouse and, standing before an array of microphones and cameras, repeated this irrelevant mantra again, before protestors heckled him into a hasty retreat, where he undoubtedly received news of the Manhattan indictment and wished he’d become a commercial fisherman.
But it was something Downing said before the sentence was pronounced that sticks in the mind. Of his client, Downing said:
“But for a short stint as campaign manager in a national election, I don’t think we would be here today.”
This is probably true. But, if it is, why did Manafort take the job at all? He only had the gig for a couple of months, and his experience with this particular candidate was every bit as miserable as you’d imagine it would be. I know he probably was running the ball for his pals in Ukraine, and that he was desperate for money, but that game seems hardly worth the candle, and he probably could have achieved both of these objectives without being put in nominal charge of the campaign, where the spotlight undoubtedly would be more intense.”
Man took an unpaid job while owing more than $10 million to a russian with ties to radioactive assassins. Get’s arrested. While under arrest he lies to prosecutors after taking a deal.
Don’t need to know much about addition to solve that equation.
The time he spends in prison will certainly impact his life longevity. It is not an easy stint for sure.
I am sure there is more to come out of the Mueller investigation which will also be prosecuted. Trump thinks its over. They will haunt him until he leaves office and beyond. If they break him financially it will hurt more than anything else.
I hesitate to get too far into this discussion without seeing the actual report. But in this one area I am as confused as the author:
“Why in the dang heck did the special counsel’s office just go out of its way to accuse former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort of discussing Russia policy in 2016 with someone who had ongoing ties to Russian intelligence … if it was also about to conclude that no one in the campaign “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”?
Here’s what I’m talking about:
• In March 2018, the special counsel’s office made a filing in its case against a lawyer named Alex van der Zwaan, who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about something related to Paul Manafort’s pre-Trump work in Ukraine with another Trump adviser named Rick Gates. In that filing, the special counsel noted that a fourth individual involved in Manafort’s business “has ties to a Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016.” He’s called Person A here, but other reports identified him as Konstantin Kilimnik…..
• In July 2018, Mueller formally accused Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, of hacking and distributing Democratic Party emails in 2016.
• Then, in November 2018, the special counsel’s office asked a federal judge to formally rule that Manafort had lied to authorities about (among other things) meeting with Kilimnik in New York City in August 2016. In a January 2019 filing, Manafort’s defense team disclosed that the special counsel had asserted that, at that August 2016 meeting, Manafort and Kilimnik discussed Trump campaign polling information as well as a potential resolution of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, over which the U.S. had imposed economic sanctions on Russia. In a February 2019 hearing, here’s what special counsel prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said about the issue: “This goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating. And in 2016 there is an in-person meeting with someone who the government has certainly proffered to this court in the past, is understood by the FBI, assessed to be—have a relationship with Russian intelligence.”
So, it’s on the record that the special counsel believes that Paul Manafort met, while he was Trump’s campaign chairman, with an individual who had ongoing ties to the Russian intelligence agency that interfered in the 2016 election. We know that their meeting touched on a topic with direct relevance to U.S. sanctions against Russia. We know that sanctions were one of the big reasons that the Russian government was interested in the 2016 U.S. election to begin with. How, then, does Mueller square the existence of this meeting with a conclusion that no one on the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its 2016 election interference? And if Mueller believes that no such coordination took place, then what was the point of pursuing a finding of fact that seems to suggest otherwise in federal court a month ago?
It is urgent that the full Mueller report be released if only to prevent my brain from self-combusting while trying to figure this out!”
Total Household Debt as reported by the New York Fed is at record levels.
Earlier this month, General Motors shut down its plant in Lordstown Ohio. Three more of their plants in the US are to be shut down over the next year.
Some of GM’s former employees will be able to transfer but the others are doomed to lower paying jobs. And of course those communities can not transfer, so they will have to cut spending or raise taxes. But those communities should take heart, this could improve the economic situation for Mexico’s maquiladoras.
Bloomberg is reporting that Fed Chairman Powell is signaling a long pause in rate increases. It seems that the chairman is looking for higher inflation. But the CPI stats have had much of reality removed from them, or should I say ‘ hedonically improved’ from them. A search for inflation there is doomed to disappointment. Perhaps he should carry a lantern.
In that same Bloomberg article we find “Policy makers appear to have cooled on the notion of any meaningful, lasting impact from last year’s tax reforms and instead project a return to trend growth, a stabilization of the unemployment rate and little pickup in price pressures. “
I am tempted to call the latest bit of Republican economic wizardry ‘the little tax cut that couldn’t’. But that would imply that there were ‘little tax cuts that could’. I have not had any experience with those.
So here we stand. The Effective Fed Funds Rate is currently at 2.4% versus the 5.26% in June 2007, about five months before the last recession began. And the Federal Reserve is afraid of any further increase in the near future.
We are in purgatory, paying for our economic sins of the last 25 years. And neither political party is willing to commit to any meaningful reform of US free trade policy. They continue to standpat!
Eleven years of recovery and counting.
Re: Learning the wrong lessons from the 737 Max crisis
https://www.smithsonianchannel.com/shows/air-disasters/free-fall/802/3467449
“highly automated A-330 fires off a series of contradictory warnings and repeatedly nosedives toward the Indian Ocean”
Just watched this on Smithsonian. Same scenarios as 737 Maxs. Happened to three airliners before they caught on.
The party of Trump must be getting worried about the growing movement to defang the useless Electoral College. This morning I found two Federalist op-ed pieces. One was posted on msn.com:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/without-the-electoral-college-the-united-states-is-no-longer-a-republic/ar-BBV5IeC?ocid=spartandhp
And the other was a recycled piece from Sep 2016 over at the thefederalist.com website:
http://thefederalist.com/2016/09/16/the-electoral-college-still-makes-sense-because-were-not-a-democracy/
Both are evidence of a shockingly incomplete knowledge of history as well as an inability to understand simple arithmetic.
The very fact that the majority wants majoritarianism is why the Electoral College exists in the first place. Otherwise, three cities in the United States would decide the fate of the entire country, and a charismatic smooth-talker would eventually turn into Caesar.
As it happens, during the early years of the Republic, the Presidency was dominated by Virginia and Ohio, so apparently the goal of spreading the influence of the Presidency across the country didn’t work out so well.
Having read the history of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, and being well versed on the ongoing chaos of Europe, they understood that any project that guarantees liberal instincts need to be saved from its universalist extreme tendencies that eventually cause destruction.
I’ve always wondered why Federalist types have such a pathetic understanding of Roman history. I’m not aware of any historian who would regard the Roman Republic as being afflicted by “liberal instincts.” Apparently Caesar, Crassus and Pompey were closet left wingers fighting against elites. Right.
It gets worse. The recycled Sep 2016 op-ed tells us that:
If a president is elected by a simple majority of votes, a candidate who is wildly popular in one region (e.g., Ted Cruz in Texas, Mitt Romney in Utah) can ignore smaller regions and campaign only where large majorities are possible. Or a candidate who kills in California and New York can write off “flyover country” completely.
If this strikes you as arithmetically challenged, you’d be right. It’s got things exactly backwards. Electing a President by the popular vote encourages a candidate to go after the most votes irrespective of the geographic location. Writing off a hard-to-win state would not make any sense. It’s the Electoral College system that ensure candidates only focus on a dozen or so states that will matter in November.
Plato’s “Republic” heavily influenced Madison and the other framers to devise a Constitution that protected the minority. Plato held that the ideal, i.e., just, form of government was one in which power was shared correctly between workers, warriors, and rulers. Madison held that the ideal, i.e., American, form of government was one in which power was shared correctly between judges, lawmakers, and rulers.
Now I’ve read Plato’s “Republic” many times, and I can’t say that I’ve ever come away with that interpretation. This is sheer nonsense. There was no sharing of political power in Plato’s “Republic.” The artisan class did what it did an nothing more. The guardian class did its thing and nothing more. The philosopher kings alone ruled the Republic, and they ruled it for the enlightenment of philosophers. Plato’s idea of justice was that each element of the Republic kept to its own sphere.
The Electoral College was a disaster right out of the gate; hence we got the 12th Amendment. The Founders were not gods. They made plenty of mistakes. The gave us slavery. They also gave us a federalist style government in which people mattered less than the knitting together of otherwise autonomous mini-republics called states. The problem with the Electoral College isn’t just that it gives us undemocratic results; it’s that it gives voting rights to an abstract political entity called a state equal status with the votes of living humans.
Chris Wallace the voice of reason? Good for him.
“Despite the fact that almost no one has yet read the Mueller report, after it was announced that no further indictments would be filed as a result of its findings, some Republicans, including President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, took a victory lap. This “marks the end of the Mueller investigation,” Giuliani told Fox News, before firing off tweets demanding apologies from those who had previously accused Trump of colluding with Russia. But Fox’s Chris Wallace was quick to point out that such celebrations are extremely premature.
For one, while the fact that no more charges will be brought as the result of Mueller’s investigation does let figures like Don Jr. off of this particular hook, it doesn’t mean very much when it comes to the president himself. The Department of Justice has said that it will not indict a sitting president even if he appears to have committed crimes, so the fact that Trump will not be indicted in no way suggests that the report vindicates him.
“To say that somehow this clears the president seems like the height of rushing to judgment,” said Wallace. He also explained that based on the results of the Mueller report, Congress will determine whether or not to impeach Trump.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a26916444/chris-wallace-mueller-report/
Personally, I believe that if the Report is not made public, the House needs to impeach trump. Course, I am long past convinced there was a conspiracy with the trump campaign, and have already seen trump twice plead guilty to obstruction of justice(the second time while handing classified information to a couple of russians in the oval office.
And one more thing.
“Read again, especially, Jackson’s gutting of the now-familiar “no collusion” misdirection that Manafort’s lawyers tried to pull on her prior to sentencing on Wednesday. From the Washington Post:
“The ‘no collusion’ refrain that runs through the entire defense memorandum is unrelated to matters at hand,” she said. “The ‘no collusion’ mantra is simply a non sequitur. The ‘no collusion’ mantra is also not accurate, because the investigation is still ongoing.”
This strategy by the defense was universally identified as a sub rosa plea for a pardon from Manafort’s most prominent former North American client. And Jackson’s stern rebuke became especially piquant given the fact that Manafort’s lawyer, Kevin Downing, came out of the courthouse and, standing before an array of microphones and cameras, repeated this irrelevant mantra again, before protestors heckled him into a hasty retreat, where he undoubtedly received news of the Manhattan indictment and wished he’d become a commercial fisherman.
But it was something Downing said before the sentence was pronounced that sticks in the mind. Of his client, Downing said:
“But for a short stint as campaign manager in a national election, I don’t think we would be here today.”
This is probably true. But, if it is, why did Manafort take the job at all? He only had the gig for a couple of months, and his experience with this particular candidate was every bit as miserable as you’d imagine it would be. I know he probably was running the ball for his pals in Ukraine, and that he was desperate for money, but that game seems hardly worth the candle, and he probably could have achieved both of these objectives without being put in nominal charge of the campaign, where the spotlight undoubtedly would be more intense.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a26813244/paul-manafort-sentenced-washington-dc-court/
Man took an unpaid job while owing more than $10 million to a russian with ties to radioactive assassins. Get’s arrested. While under arrest he lies to prosecutors after taking a deal.
Don’t need to know much about addition to solve that equation.
The time he spends in prison will certainly impact his life longevity. It is not an easy stint for sure.
I am sure there is more to come out of the Mueller investigation which will also be prosecuted. Trump thinks its over. They will haunt him until he leaves office and beyond. If they break him financially it will hurt more than anything else.
I hesitate to get too far into this discussion without seeing the actual report. But in this one area I am as confused as the author:
“Why in the dang heck did the special counsel’s office just go out of its way to accuse former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort of discussing Russia policy in 2016 with someone who had ongoing ties to Russian intelligence … if it was also about to conclude that no one in the campaign “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities”?
Here’s what I’m talking about:
• In March 2018, the special counsel’s office made a filing in its case against a lawyer named Alex van der Zwaan, who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about something related to Paul Manafort’s pre-Trump work in Ukraine with another Trump adviser named Rick Gates. In that filing, the special counsel noted that a fourth individual involved in Manafort’s business “has ties to a Russian intelligence service and had such ties in 2016.” He’s called Person A here, but other reports identified him as Konstantin Kilimnik…..
• In July 2018, Mueller formally accused Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, of hacking and distributing Democratic Party emails in 2016.
• Then, in November 2018, the special counsel’s office asked a federal judge to formally rule that Manafort had lied to authorities about (among other things) meeting with Kilimnik in New York City in August 2016. In a January 2019 filing, Manafort’s defense team disclosed that the special counsel had asserted that, at that August 2016 meeting, Manafort and Kilimnik discussed Trump campaign polling information as well as a potential resolution of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, over which the U.S. had imposed economic sanctions on Russia. In a February 2019 hearing, here’s what special counsel prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said about the issue: “This goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating. And in 2016 there is an in-person meeting with someone who the government has certainly proffered to this court in the past, is understood by the FBI, assessed to be—have a relationship with Russian intelligence.”
So, it’s on the record that the special counsel believes that Paul Manafort met, while he was Trump’s campaign chairman, with an individual who had ongoing ties to the Russian intelligence agency that interfered in the 2016 election. We know that their meeting touched on a topic with direct relevance to U.S. sanctions against Russia. We know that sanctions were one of the big reasons that the Russian government was interested in the 2016 U.S. election to begin with. How, then, does Mueller square the existence of this meeting with a conclusion that no one on the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its 2016 election interference? And if Mueller believes that no such coordination took place, then what was the point of pursuing a finding of fact that seems to suggest otherwise in federal court a month ago?
It is urgent that the full Mueller report be released if only to prevent my brain from self-combusting while trying to figure this out!”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/mueller-manafort-kilimnik-no-collusion-how.html
so fen weird