Thursday, December 6, 2018

SECRET REPORT: TRUMP VOWS HE DOESN'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THE STAGGERING NATIONAL DEBT BECAUSE THE CRISIS WILL HIT AFTER HE IS IMPEACHED

 "Trump's alleged comment is maddening and disheartening, 

but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible 

and self-serving neglect.  I'll leave you with this reminder of 

the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going 

to do a damn thing about it."



TRUMPERNOMICS:
THE SUPER RICH APPLAUD TWITTER’S TRUMP’S TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH!

"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the super-rich, on top

of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of the supposed

recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1 percent income

bracket."



Report: Trump Says He Doesn't Care About the National Debt Because the Crisis Will Hit After He's Gone

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2018/12/06/report-trump-says-he-doesnt-care-about-the-national-debt-because-the-crisis-will-hit-after-hes-gone-n2537038

 Guy Benson

In politics, a "Kinsleyan gaffe" is defined as the misfortune of a politician inadvertently telling the truth.  A new piece in the Daily Beast reports that President Trump myopically rebuffed early recommendations that his administration take policy steps to curb the country's unsustainably swelling national debt, privately telling aides that the eventual fiscal crash would happen on someone else's watch.  If accurate -- and it's certainly plausible, given his campaign rhetoric -- this calculation combines irresponsible, short-sighted, buck-passing cynicism with frank honesty:
The friction came to a head in early 2017 when senior officials offered Trump charts and graphics laying out the numbers and showing a “hockey stick” spike in the national debt in the not-too-distant future. In response, Trump noted that the data suggested the debt would reach a critical mass only after his possible second term in office. “Yeah, but I won’t be here,” the president bluntly said, according to a source who was in the room when Trump made this comment during discussions on the debt…Several people close to the president, both within and outside his administration, confirmed that the national debt has never bothered him in a truly meaningful way, despite his public lip service. “I never once heard him talk about the debt,” one former senior White House official attested.
As I wrote in this space not too long ago, neither of our political parties is truly serious about addressing this brewing crisis, or arresting our downward spiral. Republicans were full of sensible, forward-looking ideas and policies when those policies had no chance of implementation, but when they gained full power in Washington, the difficult, painful and necessary project of entitlement reform fell by the wayside. (I should note that the unsuccessful Obamacare repeal effort would have reformed one major program, and will remind readers that tax reform is emphatically not the causeof our fiscal difficulties). The president is simply not interested in leading on this issue, and he's reportedly told his subordinates precisely why that's the case.  Liberals will undoubtedly decry this revelation as further evidence of Trump's recklessness and selfishness, but let's be serious: If the quote attributed to the president is accurate, he was simply stating outright what many, many politicians have privately concluded for years, all while feigning concern about the debt for public consumption.
The Obama administration, under which the national debt exploded to an unprecedented degree, vastly expanded an already-failing entitlement -- and now President Obama has endorsed the massive expansion of another already-insolventprogram, which is already the top driver of our long-term debt.  The math is empirical and could not be clearer, yet any and all efforts to tackle the predictable crisis have been reflexively rejected.  I'll never forget the following exchange between Obama's Treasury Secretary and then-House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan.  Ryan, one of a handful of politicians who actually seems to understand the urgency of the long-term debt challenge, confronted Timothy Geithner with the same sort of chart that apparently left Trump unmoved.  Geithner outright admitted that Team Obama had no alternative solution, simply reaffirming that they opposed Ryan's reforms.  Toggle ahead to the very end of this clip:


 this clip:
"You are right to say we are not coming before you to say we have a definitive solution to that long term problem. What we do know is, we don't like yours."

Indeed, most Democrats have found far greater utility in attacking GOP policy ideas on this front -- often deeply dishonestly -- than presenting any viable proposals of their own.  Their vision for more State control and more federal spending directly conflict with the ostensible goal of reducing our debt burden.  Many politicians pay lip service to the national debt because that's what people want to hear -- even if many of those same voters bristle at the inherent realities of real solutions.  Trump's alleged comment is maddening and disheartening, but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible and self-serving neglect.  I'll leave you with this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it.  And if you missed my analysis this week, it's worth once again pointing out that the Left's supposed "ideas" for funding a breathtaking expansion of government healthcare are wildly unserious and unrealistic:

OBAMANOMICS TO SERVE BANKSTERS 

AND GLOBAL BILLIONAIRES

"One of the premier institutions of big business, JP Morgan Chase, issued an internal report on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 2008 crash, which warned that another “great liquidity crisis” was possible, and that a government bailout on the scale of that effected by Bush and Obama will produce social unrest, “in light of the potential impact of central bank actions in driving inequality between asset owners and labor."  

Dow Plunges by Nearly 800 

Points on Fears of Economic 

Slump


NEW YORK, NY - NOVEMBER 12: Traders and financial professionals work at the closing bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), November 12, 2018 in New York City. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell over 600 points on Monday and shares of Apple were down 5 …
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
2:49

Stocks and bond yields were battered Tuesday as investors’ worries about the pace of economic growth and the White House sent out confusing signals about the trade truce.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by about 798 points or 3.09 percent. The S&P 500 plummeted 3.23 percent. The Nasdaq Composite plunged 3.8 percent, pulling it back down below a 10 percent decline from its recent high. The small-cap Russell 2000 dropped by 4.4 percent.
Investors bought up bonds, pushing prices up and yields down. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell to a recent 2.912% from 2.990% Monday. The yield hit a seven-year high of 3.232% on November 8.
The gap between the tw0 and 10-year Treasury notes narrowed to just 8-tenths of a percentage point, the slimmest gap since 2007. Yield on the 5-year Treasury were again below those for 2-year and 3-year Treasuries, an inversion of the ordinary term structure that many investors fear could foreshadow an economic slowdown.
The gap between three-month and 10-year Treasuries fell to 49-tenths of a percentage point but remained in positive territory. Prior to every recession, this has turned negative.
Conflicting signals about the 90-day tariff truce with China added to investor worries. Larry Kudlow, the chief White House economic adviser,  initially said Monday that the clock on the 90-day truce would begin on January 1, upsetting expectations that it had begun on December 1. Hours later the White House reversed itself, saying the clock did indeed begin running on December 1.
Adding to the confusion, President Donald said Sunday that China’s car tariffs would be removed but China has not confirmed this. Similarly, Kudlow said Monday that he expected China to begin changing its trade policies immediately but as of Tuesday no changes have been announced. China has also not detailed what American goods it would be purchasing to fulfill its side of the deal struck Saturday night in Buenos Aires.
Several investors said the lack of details about the trade truce, and already emerging differences between the U.S. and China about what has already been agreed, fueled doubts that a lasting deal could be struck. President Trump’s tweets, describing himself as a Tariff Man, helped fuel those doubts.
The stock market will be closed Wednesday, which may have contributed to Tuesday’s sell-off as investors worried about risks that could develop while stocks are not trading.
Trade and recession fears hit Wall 

Street

Wall Street plunged on Tuesday, with the Dow falling by 800 points and all major indexes down significantly, as the purported trade deal between US President Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping, announced on Saturday night, began to unravel.
However, the fear that nothing has been resolved in the trade war was by no means the only factor in the market sell-off, which followed a surge on Monday. A major issue was growing concern that the US could be entering a recession with yields on bonds falling, an indication that investors are seeking a “safe haven.”
The growing negative sentiment over the outlook for the US economy was seen in a flattening of the yield curve—the difference between the interest rate on shorter and longer-term bonds. At one point, the difference between the yield on two-year and ten-year bonds was under 10 basis points, its lowest level for 11 years. A flattening yield curve is widely regarded as indicative of a recession.
The market slide went across the board with companies that are dependent on global markets, such as Caterpillar and Boeing incurring losses of 6.9 percent and 4.9 percent respectively. High-tech stocks sensitive to trade war fears, also fell, with Apple down 4.9 percent. The tech-heavy NASDAQ index dropped 3.8 per cent and is now more than 10 percent below its August high.
The S&P 500 index dropped by 3.2 percent and fell below its 200-day moving average, a key indicator of the market trend. Bank stocks were also down as, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, “investors’ worries of a recession and the strength of the economy grew.” An index of bank shares fell nearly 5 percent.
The doubts over the possibility of any agreement with China started from the top with tweets by Trump indicating he doubted whether anything had been achieved. He said his economic team would be “seeing whether or not a REAL deal with China is actually possible” before the deadline on negotiations expires on March 1.
“If it is, we will get it done … if not, remember, I am a tariff man,” he wrote.

According to the US report of the talks, China agreed to talks on so-called “structural” changes in its economy in response to Washington’s claim that it is engaging in the theft of intellectual property (IP) and using forced technology transfers to enhance is technological and industrial base. Failure to reach an agreement on this issue would see the US lift the tariff rate imposed on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods from 10 percent to 25 percent.
But there has been no acknowledgement by China on whether negotiations on this key US demand has been agreed to. As the Financial Times commented, the claims by Washington have either not been supported by the Chinese side or are mired in confusion.
“Not only did this cast doubt on whether the two sides would be able to reach a comprehensive deal within the next three months, it raised the possibility of a collapse even before then,” it stated.
Throughout yesterday, doubts were cast over the purported deal as the contrast between what the US said and the Chinese version of events became more apparent. In the wake of the meeting with Xi, Trump claimed that China had agreed to cut tariffs on US cars, but this was not mentioned in the statements from either side.
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow insisted on Monday that such an agreement had been reached. However, he was then forced to back away yesterday saying while Washington did not have a “specific agreement,” the tariff reduction was highly likely.
Kudlow was also corrected by the White House after saying that the 90-day deadline would start in January. The starting date is December 1.
The changing story on car tariffs, while important in itself, has broader significance as it casts doubt on what was actually agreed.
Agriculture is another area where the situation is, to say the least, unclear. The US said that there would be a “very substantial” increase in exports, but this was not reflected in Chinese statements on the talks.
Amid the confusion and conflicting accounts of what was and was not agreed in Saturday night’s meeting between Trump and Xi, the key issue remains the Chinese program of industrial and technological development under its “Made in China 2025” plan.
In a comment published in the Financial Times on Monday, former IMF economist and Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan noted that the issues dividing the US and China go far beyond the question of trade. The strongest indication of the extent of the conflict was the speech by US Vice President Mike Pence in October “where he all but declared a new cold war.”
Rajan, one of the very few economists to warn of a financial bubble prior to 2008, said while it was “reasonable” for China to bring its intellectual property practices “in line with western norms,” the Chinese fear this is “not the ultimate US aim.”
“They believe that even if they comply, the US will not allow a significant presence in frontier industries including robotics, artificial intelligence and semi-conductors. That, to the Chinese smacks of a ceiling on development. It is simply non-negotiable.”
Rajan warned that simply piling tariffs on tariffs would lead to China becoming a country under siege, “precipitating a cold, even hot, war.”
He called for major powers to come together to negotiate changes in China’s IP practices. “But the quid pro quo has to be to recognise that the world is multi-polar, that China should have more power and responsibility in global institutions” and that a sensible deal “will require compromise on both sides,” he wrote.
However, the major obstacle for this would-be rational scenario is that the conflict is not governed by the laws of reason but by material economic and geo-political interests. The US is not prepared either to recognise the need for a “multi-polar world” or to make concessions to China’s increased economic power. Washington fears this will undermine its global economic and military dominance, which it is determined to maintain at all costs and by whatever means necessary.

This determination will assume even more belligerent forms under conditions of a significant downturn in the US economy or the development of a recession, the signs of which are growing.

Dem Rep. Ryan on GM Closures: ‘How Much Longer Are We Going to Do This Where the Worker Doesn’t Matter?’







 11
1:23

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) on Thursday’s MSNBC broadcast of “Morning Joe” discussed General Motors’ closing of car plants in Ohio, Michigan and Maryland, which has been met with criticism by President Donald Trump.


Ryan asked how much longer will the working-class not matter “because it’s becoming impossible for them to keep their nose above water.”
“Where’s the social compact that we used to have between corporations and their workers? Where’s the social contract between the government and our workers?” asked Ryan. “I mean, it’s like the worker — there’s always an excuse that the worker is going to get hammered, that they’re going to lose their pensions, they’re going to lose their jobs, they’re going to have to move. Meanwhile, corporations, in this instance, General Motors got $157 million in tax cut just last year. I mean how much longer are we going to do this to where the worker doesn’t matter? And I hope this is a real wake-up call for us to say, workers, white, brown, black, gay, straight, working-class people have got to come together because it’s becoming impossible for them to keep their nose above water anymore.”
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent

GM, Ford, Bayer, Bombardier

Global investors demand escalation of class war on workers’ jobs and wages


5 December 2018
Amid the havoc on the global stock exchanges Tuesday, triggered by concerns over a US-China trade war, signs of a global economic downturn and growing resistance by workers, the most powerful financial interests are demanding an acceleration of the war against the working class.
A week after General Motors announced the planned shutdown of five plants in the US and Canada and the elimination of nearly 15,000 hourly and salaried workers’ jobs, an analyst for Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley told investors that Ford would likely carry out even deeper cuts, eliminating 25,000 employees from its global workforce.
While Ford has yet to provide details of its $11 billion cost-cutting “Fitness Program,” Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said in a note to investors, “We estimate a large portion of Ford’s restructuring actions will be focused on Ford Europe, a business we currently value at negative $7 billion. But we also expect a significant restructuring effort in North America, involving significant numbers of both salaried and hourly UAW and CAW workers,” Jonas said, referring to autoworkers who belong to the United Auto Workers and the Canadian Auto Workers, now known as Unifor.
The decision by GM to shut major assembly plants in Detroit, Lordstown, Ohio and Oshawa, Ontario, plus two transmission plants in Michigan and Maryland, led to a sharp spike in GM shares last week. The company, which is expected to make $10 billion in profits in 2018, is freeing up billions in cash to continue its stock repurchase program and dividend payments to wealthy investors.
After selling off its European operations and closing all its plants in Australia and South Africa, GM is closing an assembly plant in Gunsan, Korea, and two other, still unspecified, international plants in the coming year.

Despite eight straight years of profits, Wall Street has been punishing Ford stock, which has fallen by 25 percent this year, to only $9.24 per share. Last August, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Ford’s credit rating to Baa3, one notch from junk status, pointing to softening profit margins in North America, reversals in the Chinese market and large losses in Europe and South America.
The brutal downsizing by the US-based automakers is part of a wave of international job cuts.
German-based drug manufacturer Bayer AG has just announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs out of its global workforce of 118,000 by the end of 2021. On Monday, more than 1,000 Bayer workers protested at the company’s site in Wuppertal, in western Germany. The company, which plans to carry out a “significant number of reductions” in Germany, is also eliminating more than 4,000 jobs at its crop sciences division, a consequence of Bayer’s acquisition of US rival Monsanto earlier this year. The moves, which came after shares of the company fell by more than a third this year, are seen as an effort to mollify Wall Street.
French steel pipe maker Vallourec, which owns a steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio, near the threatened GM Lordstown plant, announced plans last week to cut 1,800 jobs—1,200 at three sites in France and 600 in Germany. The company, which supplies the oil and gas industry, has struggled to recover since oil prices crashed in 2015. It has seen its shares plummet 56.6 percent over the last year.

Last month, Montreal-based train and aircraft manufacturer Bombardier announced the layoff of 5,000 workers by 2021 to reduce its long-term debt by $9 billion. The workers being terminated include 2,500 in Quebec, 500 in Ontario and another 2,000 in overseas operations, including 490 in Belfast, Ireland. The announcement follows the elimination of 14,500 jobs around the world over the last three years.
Toronto-based Thomson Reuters Corporation said on Tuesday it will cut its workforce by 12 percent by 2020, axing 3,200 jobs. The media and information company said it will buy back $9 billion in stock from shareholders starting Tuesday, sending its stock up 4 percent.
US corporations are expected to spend a record $1 trillion on stock buybacks this year, according to Goldman Sachs, up 46 percent from 2017. Global mergers and acquisitions hit a record $3.3 trillion in the first nine months of the year, eclipsing the previous high on the eve of the global financial crash more than a decade ago.
In its more recent report, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) concluded that the world economy would expand by only 3.5 percent next year, down from 3.7 percent this year. The 34 member states in Europe and North America would see an even sharper decline, with growth falling from 2.5 percent in 2017–18 to just under 2 percent by 2020.
Commenting on the report, the New York Times wrote that the OECD had “effectively concluded that the current situation is as good as it gets before the next pause or downturn. If this is indeed the high-water mark of global prosperity, that is likely to come as a shock to the tens of millions of people who have yet to recover from the devastation of the Great Recession.”
“It’s just going to exacerbate the tensions that have led to the socioeconomic and political problems we have seen in the United States and parts of Europe,” Thomas A. Bernes, an economist at the Center for International Governance Innovation, a Canadian research institution, told the Times. “Inequality is going to become even more pronounced.”
Over the last decade, the ruling class has relied on the trade unions and the ostensibly reformist and “left” parties to suppress opposition to an historic transfer of wealth to the super-rich, largely through the inflation of the stock markets. The unions have promoted economic nationalism as a means of covering for their collusion with the ruling class in the destruction of workers' jobs, wages and benefits.
However, after decades in which the class struggle has been suppressed, this year has seen a resurgence of strikes and mass protests, from the wildcat strikes of US teachers to recent mass strikes in Sri Lanka, Greece and now in the streets of Paris. If the Yellow Vest movement has gained momentum it is because it has not been under the control of the unions, which opposed it and are now colluding with Macron to suppress it.

The escalation of the social counter-revolution by the ruling class, under conditions of renewed economic crisis, points to an explosive intensification of class conflict in 2019, which will come into ever more direct conflict with the trade unions, the entire political apparatus and the capitalist system as a whole.







Destroyed for Nothing

The closing of GM’s Detroit plant—erected at the expense of a vibrant urban neighborhood—is a final twist of the knife in a tale of displacement and destruction.
November 28, 2018

General Motor’s announcement that it’s cutting thousands of jobs and closing several plants has met intense criticism because the company was the beneficiary of a $50 billion government bailout in 2009—which wound up costing taxpayers $11 billion—even as the government awarded the United Auto Workers’ health-care fund a 17.5 percent stake in the restructured company. Like many big American companies, GM has been the recipient of government-subsidized largesse over several decades. One particular piece of this history is especially noteworthy now. 
Nearly 40 years ago, in one of the most egregious cases of eminent domain abuse in American history, GM built a plant on land seized from homeowners and businesses in Detroit, obliterating a multi-ethnic neighborhood known as Poletown—all for a plant that will now be shuttered so that GM can invest somewhere else in new manufacturing facilities.
Beset by foreign competition, America’s automakers began retrenching in the late 1970s, closing manufacturing facilities in and around Detroit even as the city struggled to rebound from the riots of 1967. Dodge had closed a giant plant in Hamtramck, a suburb that adjoins the Poletown neighborhood, and when GM announced that it wanted to build a new plant somewhere in America with modern industrial technology—though it was closing plants elsewhere—Detroit officials pleaded for an opportunity to find a site for the new facility. Mayor Coleman Young came up with a plan: seize some 1,500 homes and 144 businesses in Poletown, a low-income community of 3,500 where Polish immigrants had once settled. By the early 1980s, Poletown was a more diverse neighborhood, housing older Poles but also more recent immigrants and black Detroit residents. As the city deteriorated, Poletown remained relatively stable. “There is no place for us to go, no place we want to go,” two elderly residents told the New York Times in 1980, to no avail. To Detroit officials, Poletown’s appeal was its proximity to the Dodge site, providing some 465 acres for GM—if officials could just move out those inconveniently located businesses and people. To help make it happen, in April 1980 the Michigan legislature passed its infamous “quick-take” law, providing that government agencies could seize land deemed necessary for a “public purpose” and determine later how much to compensate the private landowners. That law accelerated the process of clearing out Poletown.
The neighborhood did not go down without a fight, however. Homeowners and their advocates mounted legal challenges, refused government offers, and hunkered down. Some patrolled their property, brandishing weapons and daring the government to come in and take their property. What happened next was chilling. To “encourage” homeowners to leave, Detroit began withdrawing city services. The city had managed to empty out some buildings, such as apartment houses, by paying off renters, who had little stake in the neighborhood. A few elderly residents took the money for their homes and moved on, creating a landscape dotted with abandoned buildings marked with a blue X—a prescription for chaos, which quickly ensued. Looters moved in and, in a strategy that became all too familiar in the 1970s in places like the South Bronx and Bushwick, they proceed to strip the buildings of sinks, wiring, pipes, furnaces—and then burn them. “There was virtually no trash pickup, no police presence, and before long the once-quiet neighborhood was a jumble of looters and demolition crews during the day and arsonists and fire trucks by night,” wrote filmmaker George Cosetti, who witnessed the neighborhood’s last days while filming the documentary Poletown Lives! “The night air was always smoke-filled and people slept with guns nearby.”
Residents sought to have the quick-take law declared unconstitutional, but the Michigan Supreme Court ruled 5-2 that taking private property and handing it over to a business to provide jobs for the unemployed and taxes to pay for city services qualified as a legitimate public purpose. One dissenting judge did warn that justifying government seizure of land in order to create jobs was an extension of eminent domain that “seriously jeopardized the security of all private property ownership.” Even then, however, some residents hung on, forming a redoubt in Immaculate Conception church, a focal point of much of the resistance, until police arrived to cart away the group, which included a handful of elderly Polish women.
General Motors opened the new plant, Detroit-Hamtramck, in 1985. It employed some 4,500 workers, about 70 percent of the original projection of 6,500 jobs. But the plant fell far short of the claims that city officials used to justify the property seizures. They had envisioned Poletown as a crucial step in a Detroit renaissance—the plant would attract other carmakers and auto-accessories manufacturers to the area, they believed, and spark a jobs boom. These scenarios never materialized. Detroit’s economy continued to decline, people fled the city, and today Detroit, with some 670,000 residents, is about half its size in 1980.
In 2004, Michigan’s Supreme Court overturned the “quick-take” provision that allowed the state to seize Poletown before demonstrating a public purpose for the land. General Motors got 34 years out of the plant, thanks to a $200 million government subsidy (what it cost Detroit to clear Poletown). No one can say whether Poletown, which had existed as a vibrant neighborhood for more than 100 years, would have endured longer, serving as at least one bulwark against the decline of the city, had GM not moved in. But neighborhoods have a way of outlasting manufacturing plants. That’s one reason we shouldn’t destroy them willy-nilly for the sake of a few jobs—or even a few thousand.

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