Prickly City by Scott Stantis for October 13, 2020

Well, then I guess you can’t remember it, Winslow. Even if that’s not really your issue but Carmen’s side’s.

Trump Disciples cannot remember what they never knew.

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For example, they make up the group of ‘disgusting people’ that Trump is glad he no longer has to shake hands with. But pretty much NONE of them has a clue that they are in that group.

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And they all admire Steve Bannon for embezzling their contributions to ‘We Build the Wall’. You’ve gotta wonder how many of them are contributing to Bannon’s legal defense fund.

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And they fight like hell for tax breaks for billionaires while complaining about the deficit.

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And Trump is still a Traitor.

Those who fail to learn from the past properly are just doomed.

Awww… How can you say that, Carmen?

While, there is far too much trash coming out of Trump’s White House, people have a pretty good idea that Trump is the one generating it.

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Well, we got a preview of what a lame-duck Trump presidency might look like Tuesday. Trump hasn’t even lost yet, but he abruptly cut off talks on an economic relief package millions of Americans desperately need (although as of Thursday he seemed to be backtracking).

And his motivation seems to have been sheer spite.

Given this grim reality, the federal government should still be providing the kind of relief it offered in the first few months of the crisis: generous aid to the unemployed and loans that help keep small businesses afloat.

Otherwise we’ll soon be seeing millions of families unable to pay their rent, hundreds of thousands of businesses going under.

I know, I know, the usual suspects will say that the calls for economic relief are just more big-government liberalism.

But warnings about the dangers of failing to provide more relief aren’t just coming from progressive Democrats; they’re coming from Wall Street analysts and Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

The question is, why did Trump choose to reject even the possibility of a deal less than a month before Election Day? True, it’s too late for legislation to make much difference to the state of the economy on Nov. 3, although a deal might have averted some corporate layoffs.

But it would surely be in Trump’s political interest to at least look as if he’s trying to help Americans in distress.

Why would Trump choose this, of all moments, to torpedo economic policy?

As far as I can tell, nobody has offered a plausible political motive, any way in which refusing even to try rescuing the economy helps Trump’s prospects.

What this looks like, instead, is vindictiveness.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/opinion/donald-trump-economy.html

Trump Addresses Rally in Florida. His voice sounded hoarse … the president had tested negative “on consecutive days” using a rapid antigen coronavirus test not intended for that purpose. Monday, he boarded Air Force One — where reporters were seated in the cabin — without wearing a mask. major outlets that have declined to assign reporters to travel with Mr. Trump as he returns to the trail this week, saying they do not have assurance that basic precautions will be taken to protect reporters’ health. At least three White House correspondents have tested positive for the coronavirus in the past two weeks. His cavalier attitude toward containment endangers his staff, his protectors, and the domestic workers in the White House.

Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, “It’s not clear that seeing more of the president is necessarily a help to his campaign.”

And those who can remember the past are doomed to stand helplessly by while others repeat it.

“What experience and history teach is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.” —Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The RWPs (right-wing populists, right-wing popsters) seems to be denying the Holocaust, the real reasons the confederate statues were created, the reality of Donald Trump………….

Republicans don’t win by good faith and persuasive argument, they win by trickery and force. ‘R’s don’t win by putting forth convincing reasons, but by bending the rules and cheating. They are the party of dark money and sinister motives. They are the party of voter suppression efforts and controlling women’s bodies. They are the party of bigotry and putting immigrant children in kennels. They are the party bent on screwing millions of Americans out of affordable health care. The party that stands in lock step with the most corrupt president in modern history.

Winslow explains why Socialism holds appeal for the young, while Carmen offers a possible explanation for Bernie Sanders’ continuing belief in it.

Former Republican Sen. Judd Gregg told The Hill that Trump telling America companies to stop doing business in China “is a startling blunt exercise in socialism.”

He added that the “explosion in the size of deficit spending now and for the foreseeable future” under Trump “can only be labeled for what it is: a form of socialist fiscal policy.”

A report in Reuters described the CARES Act as “an example of contemporary socialism.” It noted that “income redistribution is at the very heart of socialism” and said the CARES Act “passed by Congress and signed by Trump provided $2.2 trillion of that.”

The Denver Post described Trump’s farm bailouts as a “socialist endeavor.” Going further the Post said of the farm bailouts plus other efforts to influence free markets, e.g., the coal industry,

“You would be hard-pressed to find better recent examples of the U.S. government trying to exert influence, if not outright control, over the means of production, both domestically and abroad.”

But the most pervasive socialist move may be the Federal Reserve Bank nationalization of government and corporate bond markets in response to Trump’s demand to keep interest rates low.

“’Nationalisation’ of bond markets helps calm nerves,” reported the Financial Times.

“The Fed and other central banks effectively ‘nationalized’ the market for government and corporate bonds, strategists at Bank of America said in a note to clients in mid-July, helping lead to ‘irrationally’ high stock prices," reported Axios.com.

“Free market enterprise no longer exists,” Scott Minerd, chief investment officer of Guggenheim Partners, told Axios. “The Fed by essence of what it’s doing has taken control of the market.”

The American Conservative publication last year warned of America’s drift “to the silly socialism of the 21st (century).” Now that drift has become a plunge, a major shift its Republican instigators choose to ignore.

To my way of thinking, it’s not so much not remembering as it is distortions of what actually happened

I wonder if John Adams still gets paid if we don’t take his bait til late in the day.

Adams mentioned Soros! DRINK!!!