Donald Trump the “genius” businessman was saved from his incompetence by numerous bankruptcies, although he was able to avoid personal bankruptcy by insuring that it was his "companies" and those fool enough to invest their money in his “brand” that were the ones who suffered. Analysts who studied his business activities have determined that he would have made more money if he had done nothing at all with his inherited wealth.
Thus it is Trump who is the "stupid" one who now needs Fed chairman Jerome Powell to save him from himself, and lowering the interest rates won’t be the "magic" bullet Trump thinks it will be, given all the others things he has done to interfere with the economy; Robert Reich pointed out that lowering interest rates won’t necessarily make home buying cheaper because Trump's tariffs are raising prices for imported building material, thus cannot stop home prices from going up even more. And lowering interest rates also threatens to increase inflation that Trump as expected falsely claims is going down when the oposite is occurring--numbers he blames on "leftist" statisticians who need to be fired.
It is Trump's tariffs (technically illegal, but the Republican Congress doesn't care), his upending of the job market (that shocking revision of the jobs created in May and June from 290,00 to only 33,000 certainly at least partly a result of the effect of mass deportations) and the increase in inflation after he boasted that the prices are actually "lower" shows that Trump is flailing about and still looking for people to blame for his erratic, thought-defying decisions, refusing even to admit he is getting poor advice from far-right Project 2025 types. Trump’s firing of the Labor Department’s statistician only does one thing: now making any numbers related to employment to be nothing more than whatever makes Trump “happy”—just throw in another 500,000 for the hell of it.
While GDP went up during the last quarter, it is an "advance" calculation, and as we have seen before that is subject to "change"--not just downward, but WAY downward. The combination of a softening of the job market and rising inflation spells trouble for the future--and Trump can only blame himself, not Joe Biden or Powell. His trade “deals,” as noted are of the “just promise me anything so I don’t look the fool I am” variety. We recently saw Karoline Leavitt go off her usual juvenile insults and ridiculous hyperbole script and mumble and stumble trying to read a statement on tariffs and those trade “deals” which leads one to question her ability to read "hard" sentences, much like her "boss."
None of this had to happen. And as history has shown us, 10 of the last 11 recessions were instigated by Republican administrations, which failed to realize that real economic growth is spurred by putting money into the hands of middle to lower income consumers, not billionaires who just pocket the difference. Everything Trump does must have a benefit to himself personally--whether it’s to his narcissism, his racism or his need to wreak vengeance on those who question that fragile ego by daring to expose his lack of intellectual capacity to understand that decisions based solely on partisan and personal politics have consequences.
You name it, Trump and his stooges have broken it because they have the maturity of pampered children. If they whine and complain about cleaning their rooms or putting their garbage in the trash can, they are appeased by their parents just to make them quiet—while the “mess” just gets worse and worse, until someone in the future must clean it up.
Of course when things are not “cleaned up” and allowed to fester, the “fix” doesn’t always solve the problem. In this post here 1 a few months ago I talked about an issue I contacted the Kent Parks Department about. I received a notification over a year later that it was “fixed.” I hadn’t visited this location since I reported the issue, and this weekend I happened to be walking past it and I decided to check it out, maybe sit on that bench and take in the scenery I had pleasant viewing of before:
What I saw instead was this:
The bench was gone, and raspberry bushes were allowed to completely obscure the view of the wetlands and the wildlife that lived in it. Here is a sign suggesting that there was still a trail to walk on...
...but the only “trail” that wasn't completely covered by brush was this one…
…which merely led to a tent a vagrant was living in. Besides the clean-up of the garbage dump I reported, the “fix” included blocking the path to the viewing area from the street with these boulders:
It is clear that the people in charge decided to put in a permanent “fix,” not just to insure that someone didn’t drive a vehicle in there to dump a load of trash, but to prevent park workers from going in there to remove the brush obscuring the view. The removal of the bench for people to sit on and take in the view was clearly an understood result of the "fix."
How to interpret this? The dumping of this garbage could be seen as what the world might see as the result of environmentally-destructive "deregulation"; on the other hand, the "fix" defeats the original intent of the location--and everyone "loses."
Was this necessary? No! I had gone up there intermittently for 20 years, and other than the usual food junk people left up there, the only “serious” disturbance was the one I reported:
Note the bench that was placed on the concrete that is now missing from the second image. If something like this had occurred frequently, like once a month, then maybe I could understand why they wanted to shut this down and prevent the majority of visitors from engaging with nature to escape the harsh reality of the country we live in today.
This wasn’t a “fix” for what Walt Whitman opined about in Leaves of Grass, where humans “sweat and whine about their condition,” and “lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins”—well not everyone does, like Trump, his henchpersons all those who voted for him—and lie about “discussing their duty to God,” and are “dissatisfied…demented with the mania of owning things,” and the many who “kneels to another,”—like evil beings who present themselves in human form like Trump:
This is the future facing us, unless enough voters say we have now seen what anti-intellectual/anti-science/anti-human decency Trumpism/fascism is, and that is not what makes this country “great.” No one is "superior" unless they "prove" it in a measurable way, regardless of race or ethnicity. People who clearly are not "great" leading this country only sink this country deeper into self-destruction when their motivations are evil.
As we see in the Trump administration, "anyone" who feeds the vanity of a man who requires constant reinforcement of his intellectual inadequacies is considered qualified for any job they are themselves unsuited for (i.e. Hegseth, RFK Jr.). Even those who "suited" for their jobs (Miller, Noem) are only so because they are the living embodiment of the evil of their positions.
And yet we are told what the Trump administration is doing is to "fix" what is "wrong" with this country. What is "wrong"? Social and economic justice, free trade and freedom of expression. Shockingly, NPR and PBS are set to shut down in September because Republicans stupidly, blindly allowed Trump "claw-back" of its previously approved funding for the next two years.
Why? Because like all the rescissions of funding for projects that reflect well upon America, we no longer live in a country that recognizes that everyone has a "right" to their opinion on how this country is run, and no one's opinion is greater than the one that grants them the right to live their life as they wish.Trump, Republicans and the far-right Supreme Court is trying to take that away from us in then name of "fixing" what they see as "wrong."
But what they are really doing is hiding the view in distance that would tell us that there is something "better" out there than what they want us to know.
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