Tag Archives: donald

Raw Data: The US Trade Deficit

by NiklasBaldwin Posted on December 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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I don’t have any special reason to post this except for the fact that trade is very much in the news following Donald Trump’s election victory. For the record, then, here’s the US trade deficit since 1980:

And just for extra fun, here’s the same chart excluding trade with China and imports of crude oil:

The main lesson here is that the US trade deficit hasn’t been spiraling out of control for the past decade. It’s been declining. And practically all of it for the past five years has been accounted for by oil and China.

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Raw Data: The US Trade Deficit

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Saturday Night Live Sent a Message to the Electoral College. Just in Cases.

by TrentLangston11 Posted on December 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Electrical College is set to vote tomorrow. There is a (likely doomed) effort underway to get Republican electors to vote for someone other than Donald Trump.

Last night, SNL aired a skit about this. To me, it is perfect.

Alec Baldwin also came back to 30 Rock to play President-Elect Donald Trump in this cold open about how he is stupid, which I’m sure the real Trump loved.

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Saturday Night Live Sent a Message to the Electoral College. Just in Cases.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 16 December 2016

by GeraldoTimperley Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s that time of year again—when we beg our readers for tax-deductible donations to support our work.

But we’ve never been too much into doing things the way they’ve always been done. Case in point: Clara and Monika’s new piece that argues for investigating Donald Trump—and supporting MoJo—includes this appraisal of the media:

“Why was it only now, well past the election, that Trump is being pushed to address how we would deal with banks to which he is in debt, or foreign leaders who have a say over his company’s projects? Simply put: Math. Advertising pays fractions of a penny per click, which means that publishers have to pump out buckets of fast, cheap content to make ends meet, and that leaves little opportunity for serious investigation.

….In normal times, right now we’d be in the middle of the kind of routine end-of-year fundraising drive many nonprofits do in December (“We need to raise $250,000 by December 31!”). But these aren’t normal times. So enough with the marketing pitches. None of us needs to be motivated by some arbitrary fundraising goal. Covering Trump, and what he represents, will take everything we’ve got.”

Yep. Here’s a small sample of my headlines (from this week alone!). If you think pieces like this matter, I hope you’ll pitch in a few bucks to help us do it.

NBC NEWS: Putin Personally Directed Anti-Clicking Hacking
No, the Senate Will Not “Heavily Vet” Trump’s Cabinet Nominees
Chart of the Day: Republicans Sure Are Warming Up to Vladimir Putin
Working Class Hero Donald Trump Sure Has Been Good For Wall Street
Russia Ran the Most Epic Ratfucking Operation in History This Year
How Putin Got His Pet Game Show Host Elected President
Here is Rex Tillerson’s Awesome Record at ExxonMobil

And now, as your reward for reading this far (and donating to MoJo), here is Hopper enjoying herself in the garden earlier this week. And don’t forget: today is also Beethoven’s birthday. Let’s all listen to the 7th Symphony.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 16 December 2016

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Secret CIA Report Says Russia Intervened to Help Elect Trump

by NellEUHzum Posted on December 10, 2016

Mother Jones

Update, 11:48 p.m.: The New York Times reports that American intelligence officials found with “high confidence” that Russians also hacked the Republican National Committee, but did not release any information. Based in part on this finding, intelligence officials were able to conclude that Russia intended to harm Hillary Clinton’s campaign and bolster Donald Trump’s.

Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, according to a secret assessment by the CIA, the Washington Post reported late Friday. In a closed-door meeting last week, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the agency told US senators that it had identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who had provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked DNC emails. The agency described them as “part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.”

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” a senior US official told the Washington Post. “That’s the consensus view.”

The Post story comes after numerous calls from both members of Congress and President Obama to investigate Russia’s role in the election. Earlier today, Obama ordered the national intelligence community to conduct a “full review” of Russian interference in the campaign. According to the Post, the White House had attempted to gain bipartisan support for investigating Russian hacking as early as September, but Republicans resisted making such a public challenge.

There were also disagreements from intelligence officials on the CIA’s assessment:

A senior US official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.

For example, intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin “directing” the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior US official said. Those actors, according to the official, were “one step” removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees. Moscow has in the past used middlemen to participate in sensitive intelligence operations so it has plausible deniability.

The Trump transition team issued the following response to the story late Friday:

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Secret CIA Report Says Russia Intervened to Help Elect Trump

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Trump Still Blowing Off Intelligence Briefings

by RodrigoMota Posted on December 9, 2016

Mother Jones

A few years ago, conservatives raised an alarm over the fact that President Obama didn’t receive an in-person intelligence briefing every day. Sometimes, it turned out, he met with the briefer, but other times he just read the briefing material. This was deemed a major threat to national security.

So how about Donald Trump?

President-elect Donald Trump is receiving an average of one presidential intelligence briefing a week, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter, far fewer than most of his recent predecessors….Trump has asked for at least one briefing, and possibly more, from intelligence agencies on specific subjects, one of the officials said. The source declined to identify what subjects interested the president-elect, but said that so far they have not included Russia or Iran.

My guess is that Trump (a) thinks he already knows everything he needs to know, and (b) is afraid the briefings might force him to acknowledge things he doesn’t want to believe. In any case, he’s going to be president pretty shortly, and surely Republicans are deeply concerned about his apparent lack of interest in the intelligence community’s reports.

Right?

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Trump Still Blowing Off Intelligence Briefings

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Swamp Watch – 8 December 2016

by GregoryDerringto Posted on December 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Well, Donald Trump is just playing with us now. The great protector of the working class plans to nominate for Secretary of Labor—that’s Secretary of Labor—Andrew Puzder, the wealthy CEO of a fast-food empire who doggedly opposes a wide variety of worker protections imposed by big government. He also seems to take a fairly dim view of human labor in general, regardless of how much it costs:

Puzder doesn’t think that it’s likely that any machine could take over the more nuanced kitchen work of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s. But for more rote tasks like grilling a burger or taking an order, technology may be even more precise than human employees. “They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” says Puzder of swapping employees for machines.

Puzder might not be quite as bad as that quote suggests, but he’s hardly a fulsome friend of the working man and woman. On the bright side, Carl’s Jr. makes a good burger. If they could just improve their fries, they’d be great.

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Swamp Watch – 8 December 2016

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Republicans Need to Step Up and get Gen. Michael Flynn Out of the White House

by ChristeHeron Posted on December 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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You’ve probably heard that a gunman entered the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington DC yesterday and started shooting. He didn’t hit anyone, though, and it’s not clear if he was even trying. So why was he there? He says he was trying to “self investigate” an allegation that Bill and Hillary Clinton ran a pedophilia ring out of the restaurant.

No, this is not me being smug and elitist again this morning. This is an honest-to-goodness conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate, and it’s been making the rounds for a while. Why? Because the owner of Comet Ping Pong is both gay and a longtime supporter of the Democratic Party. And that’s not all!

It’s known, for instance that Bill Clinton and Donald Trump flew on the private plane of convicted child abuser Jeffery Epstein. Tony Podesta, the brother of the Clinton aide whose emails were hacked, was a friend of Dennis Hastert, a Republican politician who earlier this year was sentenced to 15 months in prison, and has admitted abusing boys. The Jimmy Savile scandal in the UK has featured in speculation as an example of a serial child abuser getting away with his crimes.

So far this has no connection to Donald Trump, and perhaps you’re thinking that’s another silver lining, aside from the fact that no one was hurt in the attack. But I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with only one silver lining today. You see, Gen. Michael Flynn, who will soon be Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, tweeted this a few days before the election:

And that’s not all. Here is Michael Flynn Jr., who is not just Flynn’s son. He is also Flynn’s chief of staff and closest aide. Here he is yesterday, after the shooting:

There’s much more in Flynn Jr’s Twitter feed following this, all pointing in the same direction: he is a complete crackpot. And he is one of the closest confidantes of his father, who is also a crackpot. And Flynn Sr. is the top national security aide to Donald Trump, who is well known to have a weakness for conspiracy theories already.

Obviously Democrats have no influence over Donald Trump’s White House. But presumably Republicans do. They need to figure out a way to get Flynn booted from the NSA position and as far away from Trump as possible. This isn’t an amusing joke, and it’s not just politics anymore. It’s a serious national security weakness.

UPDATE: It’s hard to keep up these days. In the tweet at the top of this post, Flynn Sr. isn’t referring to Pizzagate. He’s referring to a different pedophilia allegation involving Hillary Clinton. According to Truepundit.com, it linked “Clinton herself” and her “associates” to money laundering, child exploitation, sex crimes with children, perjury, obstruction of justice, and “other felony crimes.”

I even wrote about it back when it happened. It’s been a busy two weeks since then. Sigh.

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Republicans Need to Step Up and get Gen. Michael Flynn Out of the White House

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Trump’s Taiwan Call Was No Accident

by JavierHibbins Posted on December 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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So—about that call between Donald Trump and the president of Taiwan. First we have this:

A phone call between Donald Trump and Taiwan’s leader that risks damaging relations between the U.S. and China was pre-arranged, a top Taiwanese official told NBC News on Saturday….”Maintaining good relations with the United States is as important as maintaining good relations across the Taiwan Strait,” Taiwanese presidential spokesman Alex Huang told NBC News. “Both are in line with Taiwan’s national interest.”

And this:

The call was planned in advance with knowledge of Trump’s transition team and was the right thing to do, said Stephen Yates, a former U.S. national security official who served under President George W. Bush. Yates denied multiple media reports that he arranged the call, while adding that it doesn’t make sense for the U.S. to be “stuck” in a pattern of acquiescing to China over Taiwan.

Apparently several sources say that Yates was indeed the guy who helped arrange the call, but Yates denies it. You can decide for yourself who to believe. In any case, both sides claim it was done intentionally.

Was it a good idea? In Trump’s defense, if you’re going to do something like this, the only time to do it is right away. That’s especially true if you want to use it as leverage. Who knows? Maybe Trump’s team is planning to quietly pass along word that Trump is willing to maintain our status quo policy toward Taiwan (i.e., not formally recognizing the Taiwanese government), but only if China commits to doing something serious about North Korea.

Or maybe Trump has no bargain in mind at all, and just wants to change US policy toward China. It would be typically Trump to start out with a slap in the face so they know he means business, and then go from there.

Is this wise? I sort of doubt it, but I’m hardly an old China hand. And I have to admit that China hasn’t gone ballistic, as many people predicted. Their response so far has been distinctly low-key:

China’s first official reaction, from Foreign Minister Wang Yi, was fairly benign — though it was firm in reiterating the One China policy, under which the United States formally recognized Beijing as China’s sole government….A follow-up statement from the Foreign Ministry on Saturday, noting that the ministry had filed a formal complaint with the United States government, was similar in tone. It urged “relevant parties in the U.S.” to “deal with the Taiwan issue in a prudent, proper manner.”

Whatever you think of all this, I’m pretty sure it was no accident. Whether it’s meant just to shake up China; to act as leverage for a future bargain; or as a precursor to a policy change—well, that’s hard to say. But there was something behind it. Stay tuned.

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Trump’s Taiwan Call Was No Accident

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Donald Trump Can’t Fix Offshoring, But He’s Got Bigger Problems Anyway

by WoodrowMcCart Posted on December 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Steven Pearlstein suggests that Donald Trump’s deal with Carrier is part of a larger strategy aimed at changing norms of behavior:

There was a time in America when there was an unwritten pact in the business world — workers were loyal to their companies and successful companies returned that loyalty….Then came the 1980s, and all that began to change as American industry began to falter because of foreign competition….So the social norm changed….Although the public never much liked the idea of closing plants and shipping jobs overseas, it no longer was socially unacceptable.

Now comes Donald Trump — in the public mind, a successful businessman — who as the new president, suddenly declares that the new norm is not longer acceptable, and he intends to do whatever he can to shame and punish companies that abandon their workers….He knows that he and his new commerce secretary will have to engage in a few more bouts of well-publicized arm twisting before the message finally sinks in in the C-Suite. He may even have to make an example of a runaway company by sending in the tax auditors or the OSHA inspectors or cancelling a big government contract. It won’t matter that, two years later, these highly publicized retaliations are thrown out by a federal judge somewhere. Most companies won’t want to risk such threats to their “brands.” They will find a way to conform to the new norm, somewhat comforted by the fact that their American competitors have been forced to do the same.

I mostly disagree with this. I think the “norm” Pearlstein is talking about here is actually just ordinary economic reality. During the postwar economic boom, American companies didn’t need to offshore jobs, so they didn’t. Nor did they need to lay off workers or downsize their companies frequently. America was the most efficient manufacturer around, and there was plenty of money sloshing around for everybody. So why invite trouble?

When the postwar boom came to an end, businesses changed. We learned that what we thought had been a permanent new norm, was no such thing. It was just a temporary, three-decade blip. Starting in the 80s, as economic growth leveled off, the business community returned to operating the same way businesses had operated ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

I suspect Pearlstein is right about what Trump is trying to do. He’ll engage in some naming and shaming, and on a few occasions he’ll try to set an example by going after companies in semi-legal or outright illegal ways. It might even work a little bit, and it will almost certainly work in a PR sense. But more generally, Trump can’t keep the tide from coming in any more than any other president. It’s not as if the offshoring phenomenon is peculiar to America, after all.

The good news, such as it is, revolves around automation. Within a decade or so, most manufacturing work will be so highly automated that it won’t matter much where it’s made. We’re already starting to see signs of this. That will put an end to large-scale offshoring, but unfortunately, it will be even worse for blue-collar workers. We’re on the cusp of an era when tens of millions of workers will be put out of jobs by automation, and we’d better figure out what we’re going to do about that. But one thing is certain: whatever the answer is, it’s not naming and shaming.

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Donald Trump Can’t Fix Offshoring, But He’s Got Bigger Problems Anyway

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Swamp Watch – 1 December 2016

by ZVJArletha Posted on December 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post says Donald Trump will pick Gen. James Mattis as his Secretary of Defense. I gather Mattis is pretty well respected, though I continue to believe that Trump himself was swayed solely by his “Mad Dog” nickname.

Mattis will need a special exemption from Congress, since he’s only been retired from the military for three years rather than the legally required seven. That will probably sail through, though I sort of hope it runs into at least a few bumps. I don’t have anything against Mattis, but the 7-year rule is a pretty good one. Civilian control of the military is an important tradition.

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Swamp Watch – 1 December 2016

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