This story is about unofficial MAGA hats.
Since Trump (via his campaign) gets a cut of every “official” MAGA hat (which are not, IIRC, made in China) Trump is perfectly happy to see knockoff MAGA hats priced out of the market.
re: dumping treasuries…
all that China has to do is announce that it intends to dump treasuries – along with a putting a small percentage of these bonds on the market at “fire sale” prices – to bring chaos to financial markets worldwide.
China could even take “pre-orders” — commitments to buy the treasury bonds at specified prices if/when the come on the market. That could tie up gobs and gobs of capital…
Speaking of non-violent international conflicts such as the ones that Trump is unnecessarily provoking with China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Qatar, etc., that could and likely will eventually lead to actual violent conflict in one form or another, let alone non-violent harm to countless people in this and other countries, what happens if, as we all expect, Russia and its proxies interfere with and try to sabotage US infrastructure as we approach the 2020 elections, not just with the elections themselves and all that surrounds them, e.g. voter rolls, machines, ballots, etc., but with basically everything, to one extent or another, e.g. power grid, internet, transportation, shipping, business and e-commerce, banking, EMS, hospitals, etc. Even a partially successful attack on only a few of these could be catastrophic, and many here expect something like this to happen.
Trump & Repubs are clearly not doing anything about it, either believing that it will benefit them politically, or fearing what might happen to them if they meaningfully tried to prevent it. For all we know they’re actively enabling such attacks, through back channels and cutouts. What are the non-political components of our federal, state and local governments, that comprise the vast majority of them, e.g. uniformed military, career workers, long-term contractors, etc., doing to prevent this, and have they effectively been kneecapped by Trump & Repubs? What if something does happen (assuming it already hasn’t), and they try to respond, and are blocked by them? Will they defy direct orders and do the right thing, or will they stand down and watch the whole thing burn down? I suspect that we’ll see some of both, perhaps culminating in a minor de facto coup, where the military and such do what they need to do and give the folks at the top the finger. Which is perhaps what they want to happen, to justify a declaration of martial law and the suspension of the elections.
Normally this would be way out there in CT land. But not this time. I’m sure many, perhaps most here, share these concerns. What prompted these fears was my noticing that various online orders I’ve placed over the past week, mostly from Amazon, have been delayed in ways they never have in my 20 years of buying from Amazon (I have Prime now). Could be just some glitches, bad weather, etc., and most likely is. But it did prompt me to wonder if there’s something else going on here, a sort of trial run for the big one coming later. Amazon would also be an ideal test target, for obvious reasons.
Anyway, just thinking out loud. Ignore if this seems like crazy talk.
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Let’s face it: Trump could dig up the deceased parents of his supporters for daily necrophilic debauchery while drinking the blood of the firstborns from each generation still living, and the supporters would just claim he was giving their parents heaven babies or some such.
Hell, Falwell Jr. would probably preside over affairs, sprinkle holy water and call it the new communion.
It’s not that his supporters are (overall) stupid and can’t see the connections – they just refuse to. And Faux News gives them just enough misinformation and obscurement that they can maintain enough plausible deniability to keep the cognitive dissonance at bay.
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We need to write this down somewhere and look at it from time to time. He’s never played to his opponents, he’s alienated a lot of voters, and I believe he starts out with a nearly 3 million vote deficit in the form of the popular vote he lost to HRC. If Joe is nominated, ipso facto we get PA back.
His (shrinking) base however may not put it together that his policies are killing them when they buy that dishwasher or pound of tomatoes and just blame the retailer.
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Would someone please explain why what we are living under in the US is not a totalitarian regime? Please explain why what Trump has done is not a completed, successful coup? I’m serious.
We’ll fight for every vote, of course, but Trump’s down by percentages in the teens from 2016 in all the key states that put him over, if memory serves. He won in large part because there was a large slice that isn’t the base that said what the hell, how bad can he be? Now they know.
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We won an entire chamber of Congress and the new members were seated normally and are now giving the administration fits. That’s a hint.
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Trump’s base is so dumb they think “Tariff” is some Muslim guy who belongs to ISIS.
And speaking of our great S.O.S (appropriate acronym for someone in this job like Pompeo, isn’t it?):
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He stepped in it big time. He’s headed to Sochi next and will likely get his photo-op with Lavrov -of course.
Stable genius testing the boundaries of worldwide financial stability and the limits of his obviously flawed brain function ,this may challenge 2009 as having a disastrous effect on the average persons retirement accounts…and the serious OFF beat goes on…
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Not even then. He doesn’t pay for these things, and no one around him will tell him.
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Meanwhile the stock market has lost over 600 pts and is down over 2% Trump is killin’ it.
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Correction, Trump is killing US…worse yet…he does not care.
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And that is crucial. I think a lot of people fail to differentiate between the true believer base and his base of soft support.
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According to PBS “Marketplace”, farm bankruptcies are up 19%.
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Trump doing something stupid is no longer news. If he ever does something smart, THAT will be news.
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Totalitarianism is a political concept of a mode of government that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life.
So it’s as @mattinpa says. We still have the right to vote, to gather and protest peacefully on the street or in parks or almost anywhere, to write critically of the occupant in cyberspace and in newspaper letters to the editors and elsewhere. Most importantly, we have a chamber of Congress which is majority Democrats.
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China has timed the negotiation out perfectly. It is now planting season here. Farmers must decide how much to plant. Do they plant like last year and hope the China market reopens or that Trump has more hush money?