Your Pre Convention Dose of Trump

An Evangelical TV preacher likes Trump better than Jesus...

From RAWSTORY

Donald Trump’s lies are so fast and numerous that fact checking can’t stop them quickly enough. Trump is like a massive infection we can’t fight off.

From VOX

Trump is so dishonest and so corrupt and so self-centered and so contradictory and so inexperienced and immature…. that a number of noted historians have broken their longstanding rule and decided to speak out about a political figure before he is dead.

From the New York Times

There are Republicans who think Trump cannot win. But most of them are hedging their bets by sleeping with Trump occasionally when he phones them and promises to be gentle.

From Vanity Fair

The GOP platform calls for selling off National Forest and National Parks. Come on Big Oil and Big Timber!

From Think Progress

The platform is also saying coal isn’t dirty at all.

From SLATE

Is it possible that Trump is involved in more massive criminal activity than any candidate in history? A huge tax fraud case has just emerged, and his family is involved.

From David Cay Johnston in The Daily Beast

Trump’s and Pence’s tax policies would make every state as backward and decaying as Kansas and all the other low tax states.

From the Tax Policy Center

Some of Mike Pence’s choicest and stupidest newspaper bloviation. (Pence says CO2 from burning fuels can’t be the cause of increased global temperatures because it “is a naturally occurring phenomenon in nature…” And this one: “Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.”)

From BUZZFEED

A thoughtful piece from the New Yorker. As if thoughtful writing will save us from this juggernaut.

From Adam Gopnick

This kind of TV ad might work. It shows kids watching Trump’s various outrageous and obscene moments on camera. Of course the Trump voter doesn’t give a damn about his kids.

From the Hillary campaign, via DailyKos

The ACLU is calling Trump a clear and present danger. (Sounds of cheering from the conservatives who despise the Bill of Rights.)

In the Washington Post

Donald Trump has ended the deplorable dog-whistle racism of Reagan and Bush's Republican Party. He has replaced it with outright racism shouted into a microphone.

From the Guardian

Earlier this week Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke out about Trump and was criticized for violating the sanctity of our non-political Supreme Court. You know the one where Sandra Day O’Connor said a Gore presidency would be a disaster and then overturned his election.

From Dahlia Lithwick at SLATE

(I’m sure there were judges in Weimar Germany who spoke up about Hitler and were criticized for it too.)

Of course Supreme Court Justices have gotten political before. A few cases here:

From NBCNews

Samantha Bee explains what Trump/Pence’s new logo means

Via SALON

The Fine Print We Just Signed Has Nullified Our Legal Rights

A very disturbing article in the New York Times explains how corporations have nullified our legal rights. It's all there in the fine print at the bottom of the agreement we just signed.

I can’t decide if this is Orwellian or Kafkaesque. Maybe it’s both.

Why don’t corporations write contractual language saying we agree to allow them to commit crimes against us? If it’s written into a contract’s fine print which we must sign to complete a purchase of something we need, I guess the corporation whose product we need owns us body and soul. They can do with us as they wish.

If something is in a contract we sign is it automatically legal? Can a lawyer legalize murder in a properly written contract? Can a contract absolve a company of all responsibility for its deeds or its products? Apparently. There are arbitrators, but arbitrators need the corporations’ business. They are bound to them as firmly as we are, and will do as the corporations wish.

Our grandparents used to say “they have you over a barrel.” You’re helpless to resist. You can’t say No. You can’t fight it. Surrender. Give up. Give in. The contractual language of everyday life has put us over a barrel.

Somewhere in the fine print our corporate masters have nullified our legal rights. They have deleted their legal responsibilities for anything that might happen, for anything they might do. They have blocked our access to the justice system forever, nullifying one of the three branches of our constitutional government, at least as far as ordinary citizens are concerned.

How can this possibly be legal?

The point is, it’s not for us to say what is legal. We are nobodies. Our legal rights were suspended when we signed the agreement on our last online purchase.

If the document said we were now the legal property of the lawyer who wrote the fine print would we even know?

(One step toward removing arbitration clauses from consumer agreements.)

A Carefully Planned Train Wreck

Why do trains crash here but not in Europe or China or Japan? It's all about the privatizers.

That which the Republicans and their clients want to privatize (so they can jack up prices) they first conspire to break down. First they need to cause its failure. Cheaper to buy up that way. It's an old Mafia trick.

Here's a deep dig into the problems of Amtrak by the National Journal.

Common Dreams reports on the Republican Congress's immediate slashing of Amtrak budgets after the Philly crash.

And the reporting from the New York Times.

Does anyone see a pattern? It’s going on every day, every week, all over. Everything owned by the public and run for the public, anything the public really needs, is seen as an opportunity to privatize, to re-engineer to suit narrower interests. The purpose, as they see it, isn’t to deliver goods and services safely for a reasonable price. They see the purpose as delivering maximum profits with minimal concern for the customer or the employee. Ordinary people are hostages to the necessity of certain services, which makes the venture capitalists’ mouths water. Need is a killer business model, ripe for maximum exploitation.

PrivatizationWatch tracks the march of privatization all across the public sector.

Privatization is a shrewd and deeply heartless process and it’s been going on since Reagan took the public interest out of the equation. Look at what Mitt Romney got rich doing and see if you can do the same thing to the systems we all rely on every day. The transportation grid, the energy grid, the food and water supply. Maximum profit, minimum upkeep, short term wins and a guaranteed public need, a guaranteed demand to be squeezed and milked.

How is it done?

First they target something they’d like to hand over to their venture capitalist friends. (The way the entire public sector in the former Soviet Union was handed over to the Russian mafia, only here there needs to be a rationale.)

Find the target.

Make it fail. (There’s your rationale. Failure implies the public sector is inept, which it isn’t.)

Defund it. Break it down. Throw sand in the works. (Republicans have been doing this sand-in-the-machinery routine with Congress, with our democratic system, for the entire Obama presidency.)

Load the public sector system up with pointless burdens. See how the Republicans loaded the Postal Service up with 100 years of pension obligations to be fully funded in a couple of years? That sort of cynical trick will bust the budget and force unworkable cuts in service.

Take the system you want to take over for scrap, and get it to stop working smoothly. Destroy morale. Cut the workforce so the customers start complaining. Make everybody hate the system that used to work well for everybody and served everyone. Blame the people who are trying their best to make the system function. Foist dysfunction on them. Shoot them in the leg and laugh at them for limping.

Then BOOM. Shut ‘er down. Sell ‘er off, cheap, to their private enterprise pals.

This is what the flag-wearing anthem-singing hands-on-hearts Republicans have been planning for the Postal Service, a well-run public institution–– founded by Benjamin Franklin forgodssakes.

John Nichols at The Nation has been writing about the efforts to shut down the Post Office and privatize its parts for several years.

Want to know how privatization works out for the average American? Ask your UPS or FedEx guy how much they’ll charge to send a birthday card to your nephew in Nebraska. Will they say “48¢? No. I’m guessing they’ll say around $23.

And this, folks, is what they’re planning to do with Amtrak. Amtrak, as defunded as it is, still is the preferred transportation method for 80% of the people traveling in the northeast corridor, the busiest travel corridor in the Western Hemisphere. It could be busier if Republicans weren’t working so hard to make it not work.

Besides the passenger rail failures in the news there are almost weekly news stories about another high plains town evacuation because of a derailed oil train.

Salon has been reporting on the reason for the oil train crashes while the networks have just been broadcasting the explosions.

The private rail business isn’t interested in making their rail lines safe. They’re happy to handle a weekly train explosion. Better than fixing their rail lines. They’re misers on the classic Scrooge model: starve the system, impoverish the employees, and pay every saved dollar to the executive suite and to the handful of wealthy shareholders, who (coincidence!) don’t live along or anywhere near a rail line much less work on one.

Here's Paul Ryan's interview about the Amtrak safety fixes that have been delayed by Congressional budget cutting. Even FoxNews can't save him.

Europe’s trains run well and on time. Asia’s trains are a marvel. But we’re a dying empire. Why? Because we’re owned by a 1% crowd who don’t care if the system falls apart. They’ve already moved all the cash out of the country, the way mobsters used to loot legitimate businesses. Who needs mobsters anymore when you have a 1% who steal much bigger and much more efficiently?

The privatizers and their determined effort to break down public systems and institutions also resemble the barbarian hordes who broke down the Roman Empire. One of those tribes gave a name to what they did. They were the Vandals.

Are Workers Expendable?

Efficiency is measured by corporate economists as revenue minus expenses. Profit is created the same way. Profit therefore equals Efficiency. Profit is the ultimate good and the only obligation, an obligation only paid upward. What’s the expense economists are most eager to eliminate? The cost of labor.

Workers present downward obligations and such obligations are a burden. They are, by definition, inefficient, because obligations owed to workers are always counted as a negative. Corporations don’t feel obligations to plants and machines. Plants and machines don’t make them feel angry or guilty or deprived of profit. They can be bought and sold and don't need to be paid. They do as they're told. They can be insured and depreciated. They can be replaced with more efficient machines and don't require severance or unemployment or a pension or healthcare.

Keynes thought the unending march toward greater efficiency and greater productivity would pay a dividend to everyone in the form of leisure. He didn’t think that leisure would be unemployment and poverty. This is the looming likelihood nobody wants to discuss. We all have mixed feelings. Our retirements hinge upon the profitability of the companies in our retirement portfolios, which hinge upon the suppression of labor costs, and our retirement portfolios are purchased with wages we are paid for the work we do.

People who work for a living have a conundrum that people who own for a living never have to worry about. We’ve always been a country that worships hard work, but that god has been replaced with Profit, a higher god that believes work should be as poorly rewarded as possible. The god Profit likes the fruits of work but believes those fruits belong in the profit column. Profits belong to those who own for a living.

It would all be much easier if all work could be done by machines which don’t need to be paid, which can be depreciated and sold and moved almost like slaves. Welcome to the age of the robot.

Even China, with its endless and captive labor force, is falling in love with robots. How will this unfold? In China every human being is expendable. (The New York Times reports.)

Look at this map of most common jobs per state over the past 40 years. It’s also a map of mostly very expendable jobs, jobs that are being relentlessly robotized.

Did you notice how many states employ more truck drivers than any other kind of worker? Read this article about the replacability of human drivers.

Discuss.