The Trump Show

I stopped actively watching the daily pageant a long time ago. What does it matter that he says any particularly outrageous thing or another at a rally or an orb touching or a  not-really-a-summit or a press opportunity or any of these stage managed non-events.  It's just a TV show.  There is nothing to be learned from any of it.

They even un-shutdown the government for a few weeks so he could get this one in.  But it's just more of the same. They're gonna applaud. He's gonna say some words. The cold open of SNL will be something about Nancy Pelosi making faces from behind him or something. Stacey Abrams will respond. Bernie Sanders will do the most atrocious sexism/racism in history by commenting after she is finished. None of it will advance anything in any direction.  Then the shutdown can resume.  On to 2020.. etc. etc.

Wage insurance

This slight hint of something was the most intriguing moment of the State of The Union speech this week. Barely anyone noticed. It's good to see somebody followed up.

In February 2015, longtime wage insurance advocate Robert Litan, then a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, suggested that the policy could be more efficient than straightforward job training programs when it comes to helping workers acquire key jobs skills.

“Indeed, economic research has established that, in the absence of a major career change, the best way to get new training is on the job rather than through some government training program, where job prospects are highly uncertain after one finishes,” wrote Litan. “In effect, wage insurance acts as a subsidy for employers to help pay the cost of training new hires, while cushioning the economic pain suffered when unemployed workers take new jobs paying less than what they were earning before layoffs."

But Eisenbrey says he opposed one wage insurance scheme that was proposed during the Bush years because he saw it as a way of shoving needy people into jobs that “would otherwise be inappropriate."

“Basically the idea was to force you to do this, to dangle it out there and say, ‘Make a decision quickly when you are first taking unemployment insurance, or you’ll lose the ability to get wage insurance.’ And obviously the idea was to get people to take lower paying jobs,” said Eisenbrey.

Since Obama isn't putting forth any details, and since he really barely even mentioned this Tuesday night, it's hard to know what, exactly, he had in mind. But if I had to guess, I'd say he's thinking of something much closer to the Bush era proposal than a truly radical innovation like, say, a universal basic income would be.

Later in the speech Obama talked about teachers who have to buy their own supplies and manufacturing workers who have to put in longer hours as signs of "optimism" rather than signs that something is very wrong. In Obama's concept of political economy everything is always working out for the best.

SOTU Drinking Game

Chug an entire bottle of Jack Daniels when the President engages in rhetoric that has no or little meaning when coupled with the policies he intends it to sell. For example, when he says,

No, we will not go back to an economy weakened by outsourcing, bad debt, and phony financial profits. Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward, and lay out a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last – an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values.

Go back and read this feature story from Sunday's New York Times describing the scope of the slave labor global economy Obama has no serious plan to ever confront.

To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.

That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.

Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

Obama will speak in flattering terms tonight about the need to "restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot." He will meekly propose a return to the still laughably unfair system of taxation that was in place prior to the Bush tax cuts applied to the wealthiest earners. Keep in mind, Obama and congressional Democrats have already failed to clear even this ridiculously low set bar once during his term. This is, of course, just fine with the President for his purposes tonight and in the campaign to come. It's something he can continue to encourage us to "hope" for.

But as for that "blueprint for an economy that’s built to last"? Yeah good luck with this.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama will flesh out his populist message with new proposals to spur manufacturing, including tax breaks for companies that “insource” jobs back to the United States; to double-down on clean-energy incentives; and to improve education and job training initiatives, especially for the millions of long-term unemployed, the officials familiar with the speech said.

The former industrial base of the American economy has shifted away to totalitarian states like China where slaves are kept in dormitories to service massive Dickensian monoliths like Foxconn and Obama's proposal to compete with that is tax breaks for "insourcing"? What nonsense. More from Sunday's Times

But such calculations are, in many respects, meaningless because building the iPhone in the United States would demand much more than hiring Americans — it would require transforming the national and global economies. Apple executives believe there simply aren’t enough American workers with the skills the company needs or factories with sufficient speed and flexibility. Other companies that work with Apple, like Corning, also say they must go abroad.

Manufacturing glass for the iPhone revived a Corning factory in Kentucky, and today, much of the glass in iPhones is still made there. After the iPhone became a success, Corning received a flood of orders from other companies hoping to imitate Apple’s designs. Its strengthened glass sales have grown to more than $700 million a year, and it has hired or continued employing about 1,000 Americans to support the emerging market.

But as that market has expanded, the bulk of Corning’s strengthened glass manufacturing has occurred at plants in Japan and Taiwan.

“Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”

Corning was founded in America 161 years ago and its headquarters are still in upstate New York. Theoretically, the company could manufacture all its glass domestically. But it would “require a total overhaul in how the industry is structured,” Mr. Flaws said. “The consumer electronics business has become an Asian business. As an American, I worry about that, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Asia has become what the U.S. was for the last 40 years.”

Once again, the President's answer to a fundamentally changed world built upon the criminal and inhuman exploitation of slavery by international industrialists is... more of the sort of tax loopholes that allow Mitt Romney to pay a 14% marginal rate in the US.

What a sick joke all of this is. But, of course, it will be taken quite seriously by many. And enthusiastically so at that. Hope you have plenty liquor on hand.

Splendid little wars always come first

Poor infrastructure fails America, civil engineers report*

The American Society of Civil Engineers issued an infrastructure report card Wednesday giving a bleak cumulative ranking of D.

"We've been talking about this for many many years," Patrick Natale, the group's executive director, told CNN.

"We really haven't had the leadership or will to take action on it. The bottom line is that a failing infrastructure cannot support a thriving economy."

The ranking -- which grades the condition of 15 infrastructure entities such as roads, bridges and dams -- is the same as the the last time such a report was issued, in 2005. In 2001, the grade was D+, slightly better but still poor.

I can't tell you how sorry I am to see that we lost our "+". It used to give me so much hope. Note also that the report gives levees a "D-".

In any case this sounds like a good time for a new and better stimulus package. One that isn't all watered down the way the last one was when the President and his overwhelming Congressional majorities couldn't find the nerve to stand up to Groucho.

Of course, this time around, it may be even less fashionable for the President to demonstrate any spine given current concern that asserting one's political difference with one's opposition is bad for "the civility of the discourse". Well, that and our Splendid Little Wars, whichever you like.

In his first State of the Union address before a Congress under divided control, advisers say Mr. Obama will lay out his case for investment in education and infrastructure, while tempering his call for new initiatives with an acknowledgment of the country’s long-term fiscal challenges.

Aides said Tuesday that Mr. Obama will propose a five-year freeze on “non-security discretionary spending” though they did not disclose the details of that proposal in advance of the speech.

Translation: Obama is too enamored with his little wars to make any meaningful investment in our "grade D" infrastructure without presenting us with a Hobson's choice between that and Social Security. But at least we've arrived at a more civil-looking seating arrangement. That is very important, after all.

*CNN story is from 2 years ago. As you all know, these problems are all fixed now.

Everyone there is a "political actor"

We might wish it to be otherwise but it's just a plain fact. All this pretense of decorum doesn't sit well with me. I'd rather have all the assholes out there where I can see them.