Politics For Today - Canadian Eggs, Trump, Police

 This morning, I did a fair bit with the blog and emptying the email. Not exactly what I planned on doing, but something needing done. There was a nap.

I started on this while listening to a video related to writing. Now, I need to catch the bus for grocery shopping.

I distrust Trump's claims that other countries rip us off. If that is so, why do trades in oil take use dollars, why do other countries invest here? I think what resides in Trump's mind as a rip-off is that we should be getting more for less. It fits with his bully mentality. It is Trump wanting to rip off others. Whatever he attacks is what he wants to do. He knows he's a nasty person, so he calls those who oppose him a nasty person. 

How he made it through Wharton escapes me. He exposes his intellectual incoherence whenever he speaks. His pronouncements on the economy belong to another century or another reality. He has lived so long a life generating and discarding debtor, that he has plunged us into deficits that may actually outstrip our country's ability to generate income.

He was not the CEO of a major corporation; never was in the manufacturing sector. He speculated in real estate and franchised his name, a product of marketing and speculation. The CEO of Ford or IBM would be a better manager of the economy, but then they are real businessmen. Trump has attracted the tech bros because like Trump, they got rich on vaporware, on the hype of tech miracles, and have concluded themselves as being the height of human development. They are all parasites riding on the backs of creators.

Eggs Are Still Affordable in Canada. Thank Supply Management (The Walrus) points out Trump's lies and gives us an alternative to lower egg prices. Since I rarely buy eggs, I may be wrong that our prices in Muncie have lowered or stayed stable. Either way, Trump has done nothing to accomplish better egg prices. Supply management sounds like an interesting idea; the cons mentioned do not strike me as creating a too costly system. Notice that Canada has avoided the concentration of food producers we have here. Which will dictate it being ignored here - Big Business has taken control of our food supply thanks to our government's subsidies. Besides, Trump would never understand the idea of supply management - real estate's supply escapes management.

Front-Row Seats at the Great Lib Purge (The Bulwark) includes More Cops, Less ICE by Mona Charen, which contains the following:

A better tack is to highlight just how much the Trump administration is compromising actual crime-fighting. Diverting FBI agents to street patrols is stupid and wasteful. They are not trained for ordinary police work, but rather for finding and arresting swindlers, terrorists, and child-porn sellers. Ditto for DEA agents and the other federal officials Trump has pulled from their regular duties.

 It’s a perfect microcosm of what this administration is doing more broadly about lawbreaking. They’ve invented an immigrant crime spree and diverted resources to fighting that “threat” at the expense of real crime in America. Rather than invest in more cops, a policy that has a proven track record of reducing crime, the Republicans are spending scores of billions to harass, arrest, detain, and deport noncriminal aliens. They’ve created a massive new ICE police force that will be larger than the FBI to deal with this completely bogus crisis. The overwhelming majority of undocumented immigrants in the United States have committed no crime other than the status violation of being here without authorization, which is why ICE is tackling and arresting gardeners, nannies, and roofers. Meanwhile, our cities, which could really use some extra funds to hire more police, are being neglected.

The scariest thing about today's politics is that I find myself agreeing with Mona Charen. On one side, Trump complains about crime rates, while from the other side he cuts funds for local police. My gut is saying that Trump wants federal police instead of local police - with him as the head of that police force and director of its actions.

For me, this belongs on this post: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’ still speaks to a nation vacillating between hope and despair (The Conversation)

song for the day:

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