“…deporting 11 million immigrants who have entered the United States illegally would not hurt the economy.”
By Doug Porter
I realize that proving The Donald’s statements and actions to be untrue will do nothing to change his supporters. None-the-less, in the wake of the ‘surprise’ over Britain’s Brexit vote, I feel obligated to catalog them as they appear to underline the importance of turnout in the November general election.
Today’s topics include the economy, trade, campaign finance and questions of character
Trump-O-nomics Trumpeted
Former San Diego mayoral/congressional candidate and college professor Peter Navarro was tapped by presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump to defend the billionaire’s economic proposals in response to a scathing analysis by researchers at Moody’s Analytics.
Navarro whipped out a half-baked 11-page statement hoping to refute their conclusion that Trump’s plans for trade, taxes and immigration would effectively kill nearly 10 million American jobs and cause an unusually long recession.
The Washington Post’s snarky headline, “Trump economic plan is the best and everybody should love it, Trump adviser says” should give you a clue of what they found:
Peter Navarro
In the Trump-requested report, a University of California-Irvine economist and business school professor, Peter Navarro, contends that deporting 11 million immigrants who have entered the United States illegally would not hurt the economy. That’s because those immigrants would cease to draw public assistance and their jobs would be taken by native-born Americans, particularly African-Americans.
Navarro also contends that Trump’s threat of high tariffs on Chinese goods would force Chinese leaders to change their trading practices and eliminate their trade surplus with America, boosting economic growth in the United States.
And he says Moody’s was wrong to rely on other independent analyses that have concluded that Trump’s tax cutting plan would increase the federal budget deficit by trillions of dollars over a decade. Those analyses are wrong, Navarro says, because Trump has said his tax plan will not increase the deficit.
His real problem with the Moody’s analysis had little to do with actual data and more to do with the fact that the lead author of the plan is a Democrat and has contributed to Hillary Clinton.
Trump-O-lization Explained: USA! USA! USA!
Standing in front of a huge pile of crushed aluminum at a metal plant in Pennsylvania on Monday, Donald Trump explained his ideas on trade. To his credit, the speech was unusually specific. Unfortunately, the policy ideas contained therein were no better than the garbage he used as a backdrop.
Trump promised to redo existing trade deals and get tough with China. This from the guy whose clothing line is made in Mexico and China.
From USA Today:
“Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very, very wealthy … but it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache,” Trump told supporters during a prepared speech targeting free trade in a nearly-shuttered former steel town in Pennsylvania.
Then just to make sure the fear was ginned up enough, he went there:
Speaking to fans at the Ohio University Eastern Campus, Trump said China and other countries are taking advantage of the United States. “They’re just not treating us right, folks,” he said.
Trump also described the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal as “a rape of our country” by special interests.
Research from the Economic Policy Institute was cited throughout the trade speech. The folks at the think tank, which is generally of the liberal persuasion, were not amused:
Trump’s speech is a scam that seems to be offering a path for workers but actually just offers mostly empty boxes on trade and steers the discussion back toward the traditional corporate agenda. Real anti-elitist, that Trump.
From Greg Sargent at the Washington Post:
Trump boasted in his speech that “under a Trump presidency, the American worker will finally have a president who will protect them and fight for them,” and repeatedly accused Clinton and other politicians supported by financial elites of “betraying” American workers by prioritizing globalization over their interests.
But Lawrence Mishel, the president of the EPI, sent me a critique of the speech. Mishel noted that Trump’s account suggests that only government officials — particularly the Clinton administration and Democrats who supported trade deals such as NAFTA — are to blame for flat wages. He argued that Trump conspicuously left out the role of Republicans in this whole tale, as well as the business community’s use of its power to keep wages down and erode countervailing power on the part of labor:
Trump’s speech makes it seem as if globalization alone suppressed wages and it was done by elite Democrats. Missing from his tale is the role of the corporate community in pushing this agenda and his GOP allies in implementing it. NAFTA never would have passed without GOP votes, as two-thirds of the House Democrats opposed it!
Here’s the deal on trade: that horse has already left the barn. Once we understand that trade deals are mostly just documents on international corporate behavior written for their benefit, it should be obvious that the path forward is for governments to insist that the public good is a priority.
Jobs in steel mills aren’t coming back to the rust belt, no matter what any politician says. The question should be what will be done to repair the economic damage that’s already been caused, namely that corporations benefiting from trade deals should be paying (taxes!) to keep the overall economy and ecosystems healthy.
Trump-O-Mail
No longer will Democrat Hillary Clinton be the only candidate with an email scandal–The Donald has his own case of murky misconduct.
Foreign officials from Iceland, Britain and other countries are saying they’ve received fundraising emails from the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
From Bloomberg:
In a complaint filed Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission, a pair of non-partisan campaign finance watchdogs alleged that the Trump campaign solicited campaign contributions from foreign government officials. Not only is it illegal for a candidate to accept money from foreign nationals, it’s also a violation of the law to ask for it.
“Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign committee is violating black-letter federal law by sending campaign fundraising emails to foreign nationals,” Paul S. Ryan, deputy executive director of the Washington-based Campaign Legal Center, wrote in a statement announcing the complaint. “It is a no-brainer that it violates the law to send fundraising emails to members of a foreign government on their official foreign government email accounts, and yet, that’s exactly what Trump has done repeatedly….”
…“Help me make my first ever fundraising email the most successful fundraising email ever sent in the history of modern politics,” read one pitch referenced in the complaint sent to members of Althingi, Iceland’s parliament. In the solicitation, Trump asked for donations in amounts ranging from $1 to $2,700, and offered to match them with up to $2 million of his own money.
I suspect the lack of screening for recipients can be attributed to the poorly managed fundraising email operation, as The Hill and other media outlets have reported.
The site Ad Age reported that email-tracking firm Return Path showed that 60 percent of those emails from the Trump campaign this week went straight to supporters’ spam folders. Of those users that did receive the email in their inbox, only 12 percent opened it and 6 percent deleted it without opening it.
Trump-O-cation
Before Trump University, there was the Trump Institute.
From Mother Jones:
In a nutshell, Trump sought out a couple of late-night hustlers who had already been in trouble with the law, taped an infomercial for them, and then pocketed the licensing fee. (They were the “best in the business,” said the Trump executive who brokered the deal.) Later, having learned the hustle, Trump ended his contract with the Milins and opened up Trump University. He had learned all he needed and was ready to start pushing the hard-sell conference business on his own. Seven years later, he’s perfected the hustle even further, so now he’s running for president. You’re welcome.
And the New York Times:
As with Trump University, the Trump Institute promised falsely that its teachers would be handpicked by Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump did little, interviews show, besides appear in an infomercial — one that promised customers access to his vast accumulated knowledge. “I put all of my concepts that have worked so well for me, new and old, into our seminar,” he said in the 2005 video, adding, “I’m teaching what I’ve learned.”
Reality fell far short. In fact…extensive portions of the materials that students received after forking over their seminar fees, supposedly containing Mr. Trump’s special wisdom, had been plagiarized from an obscure real estate manual published a decade earlier.
Together, the exaggerated claims about his own role, the checkered pasts of the people with whom he went into business and the theft of intellectual property at the venture’s heart all illustrate the fiction underpinning so many of Mr. Trump’s licensing businesses: Putting his name on products and services — and collecting fees — was often where his actual involvement began and ended.
On This Day: 1971 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government could not prevent the Washington Post or the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers. 1996 – Neil Young premiered his album, “Broken Arrow” via the Internet. 2013 – Nineteen firefighters died when they are overtaken by a wildfire they are battling in a forest northwest of Phoenix, Ariz. It was the deadliest wildfire involving firefighters in the U.S. in at least 30 years.
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Doug Porter
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