Monday Open Thread

10 thoughts on “Monday Open Thread”

1. Divide And Conquer.

   One of Trump's biggest support groups is "high-income white people without college education." This would include auto dealers, who are about to be slammed by declining car sales due to tariffs.

   I used google AI as follows:

   "How many car dealers are millionaires"

   While it's difficult to pinpoint an exact number, auto dealers are among the industries with a significant number of millionaire-owned businesses, with 4,411 people in the top 0.1% of earners in 2014 drawing their primary income from auto dealership profits. 

   Here's a more detailed breakdown:

   Auto Dealers as a Source of Wealth:

   Auto dealers are one of the five most common professions for millionaire-owned pass-through profits, with auto dealership profits contributing $6.7 billion in 2014. 

   Top Earners:

   In 2014, 4,411 people in the top 0.1% of earners drew their primary income from auto dealership profits. 

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   1. Another thing that bugs me about car dealers is they tend to be anti-tax and claim they made their money on their own.

      Really? Just how many cars would you sell if we didn't have all the government constructed roads?

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2. DOGE Rewriting the SSA Code Base – Why?
   My worry is not that the can't do it, my worry is they can. Then what?

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   1. Good governance requires accountability to the citizenry; we should always have that as one of many necessary checks and balances.  That along with a few other requirements, such as: disclosure, transparency, a high measure of truthfulness, concern to protect its citizens and their rights, etc., are equally and perhaps some even far more important for a functioning democratic government than “efficiency.”

      Government is not a business.  Good government is not always good business.  To do all that government should in the manner that it should, good governance  will alway inherently be less “efficient,” at least by how business views “efficiency.” (E.g., It should almost go without saying that it will very often, even usually, take good government longer to construct something(s) than it would private businesses. Accountability requires that it should.)

      Could government sometimes be more efficient?  Of course!   Should government be more efficient at the expense of accountability and all those other important citizen protective expectations?  Oh, hell, no!

      Fuck all these DOGE fools and their self-defined “efficiencies”; they are without any proper accountability or transparency, and that is most certainly not good governance.

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3. Bill Ackerman was born in New York went to Harvard his Daddy born in New York and went to Harvard 

   Yet Bill Ackerman has para social citizenship with Israel so got all mad that college students protested his bestie and he endorsed Trump. 

   Today Bill Ackerman complained about the tariffs that Trump ran on. 

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4. Chaos Create Opportunity. Marcy Wheeler at EmptyWheel.

   I have always said — and reiterated, in some form, on Friday — that the most immediate way to reverse the damage Trump is doing is seizing opportunity out of a catastrophe he creates.

   The most likely way you will get Republicans to start breaking from Trump, the most likely way you will get Republicans to actually take action against Trump rather than simply mewling weakly, is if a catastrophe threatens the world Republicans — as distinct from average Americans — care about.

   The global crisis Trump has created is one such possible moment. But it will require keeping focus and wits in a moment of chaos.

   …

   Here, the foolishness is all Trump’s, with banks and hedgies on the hook only for their arrogance that they would be better off with a racist nihilist. That presents a kind of opportunity, even if Trump’s personal appeal counsels indirect counterattacks (for example, on Elon rather than Trump) for the moment.

   Here, the task remains the same as it was last week, and the week before, and the week before that. Hold DOGE accountable for dismantling the government. Warn about what DOGE (and Congress) are in the process of doing to Social Security and Medicaid. Make government visible, especially with stories of those fired and great government projects killed. Get non-political networks — PTAs and library reading groups and disease communities — involved in the fight. Tell the stories of the human beings stripped of their due process rights.

   Do everything you can to peel off right wingers.

   Help your neighbors.

   To the extent you are able as you try to protect your retirement and pay the bills, though, try not to lose your head over Trump’s economic catrastrophe. Lots of people are losing their head right now and the people around Trump are stuck defending tariffs on penguins, badly (and inconsistently). It is absolutely horrible, and billions of people are being hurt by Trump’s attacks.

   The economic calamity is of a piece with the constitutional one. And the economic calamity may present a path out of both that and the constitutional calamity.

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   1. I think Trump is fixated on tariffs, Republicans are going to continue to back Trump's fixation, and many will accept the Trumpian notion of "it is okay if it hurts a little bit."

      One time I think there could well be an awakening — back-to-school spending.  AP article began with

      NEW YORK (AP) — Sending children back to school in new sneakers, jeans and T-shirts is likely to cost U.S. families significantly more this fall if the bespoke tariffs President Donald Trump put on leading exporters take effect as planned, American industry groups warn.

      About 97% of the clothes and shoes purchased in the U.S. are imported, predominantly from Asia, the American Apparel & Footwear Association said, citing its most recent data….

      FDRA President Matt Priest predicted lower-income families and the places they shop would feel the impact most. He said a pair of Chinese-made children’s shoes that cost $26 today will likely carry a $41 price tag by the back-to-school shopping season, according to his group’s calculations.

      The 3 or 4 months before those purchases get made are going to have SO much uncertainty.

       

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5. Just when everything was going so very well bigly, today:

   Trump threatens additional 50 percent tariffs on China as markets slump

   What a [******] putz!?!?!?

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6. "All Power is Unitary;" Any Failure or Loss is also Unitary. Josh Marshall at TPM.

   I want to take a moment to reiterate and explain an idea I’ve discussed many times here but which is particularly relevant in this moment: all power is unitary. What does this mean? Basically it means that a political actor’s relative power is the same everywhere. It’s not divided up into different buckets. You’re not losing power on one front and maintaining or increasing it everywhere else. That’s not how it works. Losses and gains in one place show up everywhere else. So Trump taking hits on the economy weakens him in the courts and with DOGE, Congress and everywhere else. It applies the same on the upside. If Trump is winning big battles in the courts that empowers him everywhere else, even in areas that have nothing to do with the courts or the particular legal issue in question.

   This is basic to understanding this political moment because Trump and the Trump White House are engaged and playing for keeps on so many different fronts at once. They are dismantling major parts of the state; they are launching an aggressive trade war with every country in the world at once; they are also challenging and trying to bring to heel the federal judiciary, which he has to a significant degree already corrupted. There’s a ton of other things they’re doing. But they mostly fall more or less into one of those buckets. Other things are clear on the horizon but not yet an immediate focus. The big thing there is what I’ve now written about several times: the effort to bully the state governments into compliance with Trump’s demands by threatening total cut-offs of federal funds into specific states.

   You can’t understand this larger battle, one of the most important in American history, without understanding this inherent integration.

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7. Why I am not Catholic.
   what kind of "saint" insults my tiny dick?

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