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The average cost of attending Liberty University, after financial aid, is $24,000 a year. Four years of that will forever link your name with a man who teaches that only Donald Trump can save us from cannibalistic Illuminati.
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Liberty U and the Great Hero Trump
Central Pennsyltucky
For all of the creepiness inherent in any ritual loyalty oath, the Pledge of Allegiance does get right something that a great deal of American culture gets very, very wrong in 2018. It specifies what the flag stands for.
Central Pennsyltucky
Our Trade Deficit Has Grown Worse While China Finds New Suppliers and Markets
David Cay Johnston
Reports are coming in from the first skirmishes in Donald Trump’s gratuitous trade war. They show our country is losing these early rounds of what China calls “the biggest trade war in economic history.”
“Trade wars are good and easy to win,” Trump declared in a March 2, 2018, tweet. So far that’s not how it’s gone.
Among the reports from the frontlines of this economic battleground is this gem — America’s trade deficit in goods has worsened significantly since the first of this year, Census Department data show: Overall 7% worse. China 9% worse. Europe 16% worse.
China is not suffering either.
This article is the second in a three-part series in which David Cay Johnston examines the real effects of Trumponomics. The first article looked at wages. The next article will address taxes.
“China’s exports in July were up 12.2% over the prior year, ahead of market expectations,” noted David Dollar, an American trade emissary to China from 2009-13. “The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) updated forecast for China’s GDP growth this year is 6.6%, above the target for the year.”
Contrast those robust Chinese economic indicators with the pain felt by American soybean farmers, hurt so much that Trump wants to send them $12 billion of welfare. At the same time, Brazilian soybean farmers are enjoying soaring prices as China relies on this new source for imported soybeans.
Then there’s Canada, America’s largest buyer of exported goods, mostly finished products that create lots of high-paying American jobs. Trump attacked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, calling him in a June tweet “very dishonest and weak.”
Trump’s trade war began with two products from China, washing machines and solar panels. It now applies to 10,000 products.
Wars of all kinds have a nasty history of expanding, shifting and having unpredictable outcomes.
Whether Trump will pay any political price for the job losses, factory closings, falling soybean prices and other economic damage from launching a trade war on many fronts with no advance planning on how to win remains to be seen.
In the Missouri town of Poplar Bluff, near the Arkansas border, Trump’s steel tariffs may cause one of the largest local employers to go out of business. Already 60 of the 500 jobs at Mid Continent Nail Corp. have gone poof. But when journalist Melinda Henneberger spoke with some of the 17,000 residents about how Mid Continent was at risk of closing because of Trump’s trade war they said their support for Trump would not be swayed no matter what, not even by losing their livelihoods.
Nurse Carol McGee said, “It would be a detriment to our community. But when you look at the bigger picture, blaming him solely is not necessarily accurate.” Others agreed.
Oops.
Central Pennsyltucky
I wrote this article, which appeared yesterday in the (Minnesota) Star Tribune paper.
(1) If walls are not periodically reinforced, they tend to crumble. As Frost wrote: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall/That wants it down.”
(2) We often cooperate in building walls, even when we aren’t sure it’s a good idea. “I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;/And on a day we meet to walk the line/And set the wall between us once again.”
(3) Walls don’t just block outsiders; they also enclose insiders and can heighten grievances. “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out,/And to whom I was like to give offence.” (Frost seems to make the quaint and outdated assumption that giving offense is a negative thing.)
(4) Building walls can be, among its other functions, a pleasant game. “We have to use a spell to make them balance:/‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’/We wear our fingers rough with handling them./Oh, just another kind of out-door game …”
(5) When considering wall-building, one should distinguish between wandering cows and stay-at-home apples and pine cones.
(6) Good fences are not the basis for good neighbors, although that idea seems deeply comforting to many people. “He moves in darkness as it seems to me,/Not of woods only and the shade of trees./He will not go behind his father’s saying,/And he likes having thought of it so well/He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
(7) Even when people seem incapable of looking beyond their walls, they need to figure out the alternative on their own. “I could say ‘Elves’ to him,/But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather/He said it for himself.
(8) Even when others are eager to build walls, you can still meet with them — now and again — and chat.
Along with the physical walls, both around countries and around local gated communities, intangible walls come in social and economic versions.
Social walls are built along many boundary lines: political party, race or ethnicity, neighborhood, nationality, religious affiliation (or lack of it), immigrant status, gender, sexual preference, education level, job status and others. The problems arise when we hunker down behind the barricades of our own group, secure in the presumption that there’s nothing to be learned from listening to those we have consigned to the other side.
Economic walls include those along national borders affecting international trade, but also the many ways in which the well-to-do and the nearly-very-rich limit access to the neighborhoods in which they live, the schools their children attend, the credentials and social networks that lead to many jobs, the health care providers they use and more.
In the June issue of the Atlantic, Matthew Stewart offered a provocative essay about economic walls built by “the 9.9 percent” — that is, not the top 0.1 percent, but the rest of the top 10 percent.
He writes: “[A]round the world and throughout history, the wealthy have … taken their money out of productive activities and put it into walls. Throughout history, moreover, one social group above all others has assumed responsibility for maintaining and defending these walls. Its members used to be called aristocrats. Now we’re the 9.9 percent.”
“But wait a minute,” I hear you say. “Of course, other people build walls because of close-mindedness, lack of empathy, bigotry and selfishness.
“But the walls are completely different that I erect between myself and those belonging to other political, religious, racial, ethnic, neighborhood, national, gender, sexual preference, and economic groups. My walls are a necessary act of self-defense.”
Such an argument isn’t always wrong, but it often seems lacking in self-reflection. It reminds me of one of the philosophical paradoxes of self-defense arguments.
Long ago, when an invading army was attacking a walled city, it would gather up noncombatants from the countryside and force them to march ahead of the army. When the leaders of the walled city saw the huge mob arriving, they would fire in self-defense, hitting the noncombatants in front. The (previous) noncombatants in front would then fire back, in their own self-defense.
Presto! You have a battle between two groups who both have a legitimate claim to be fighting in self-defense.
Before you push back twice as hard, it’s worth considering the possibility that those who bumped you were being pushed as well, by some combination of social and economic forces, together with charismatic leaders. And those who ultimately benefit from the battle are standing back behind the scenes.
I’m not a fortune cookie or a folk song, so I won’t blow the trumpets for all the walls to come a-tumbling down. We all need our boundaries, and sometimes the boundaries need defending.
But building walls has costs, and should be done only after due consideration. It’s not always the better angels of our nature that encourage us to build walls.
Wall-building often begins with bricks of authenticity, honesty and virtue, but at some point the construction materials shift to an exuberant and exhibitionistic boorishness. Are your walls giving you cover for searching out the motes in the eyes of others, while ignoring the beams in your own eye?
Are you building a wall or an echo chamber? Are you building a wall or a fortress? Are you building a wall as part of a base camp for future aggression?
Walls that are built with enthusiastic participation from both sides will be the strongest. When you build a wall, you might want to contemplate those who are most actively helping to construct that wall from the other side — and the extent to which you really wish to cooperate with them.
If you have an uncomfortable feeling that your walls are causing you to move in darkness, perhaps you could try letting them slide into disrepair — just a little, just for awhile — and allowing elves to sneak through the cracks.
Timothy Taylor is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College. He blogs at http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com.
_____________________
“Mending Wall”
By Robert Frost (1914)
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
From the Poetry Foundation website
"Everything I know about walls: Let the poet Robert Frost be your guide:
Timothy Taylor
August 17, 2018
Walls are rising all over the world: on the U.S. border with Mexico; on India’s borders with Bangladesh and Myanmar; between China and North Korea; on Hungary’s borders with Serbia and Croatia; between Botswana and Zimbabwe; between Pakistan and Afghanistan. And more.
Timothy Taylor
August 17, 2018
Walls are rising all over the world: on the U.S. border with Mexico; on India’s borders with Bangladesh and Myanmar; between China and North Korea; on Hungary’s borders with Serbia and Croatia; between Botswana and Zimbabwe; between Pakistan and Afghanistan. And more.
But at the risk of sounding like a fortune cookie or a folk song, the more important walls are in our minds. American attitudes toward immigrants, for example, are not primarily about a physical wall at the border.
Everything important that I know about walls I learned from Robert Frost and his 1914 poem, “Mending Wall.” Here is my list of Frost’s Eight Laws of Walls:
(1) If walls are not periodically reinforced, they tend to crumble. As Frost wrote: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall/That wants it down.”
(2) We often cooperate in building walls, even when we aren’t sure it’s a good idea. “I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;/And on a day we meet to walk the line/And set the wall between us once again.”
(3) Walls don’t just block outsiders; they also enclose insiders and can heighten grievances. “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out,/And to whom I was like to give offence.” (Frost seems to make the quaint and outdated assumption that giving offense is a negative thing.)
(4) Building walls can be, among its other functions, a pleasant game. “We have to use a spell to make them balance:/‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’/We wear our fingers rough with handling them./Oh, just another kind of out-door game …”
(5) When considering wall-building, one should distinguish between wandering cows and stay-at-home apples and pine cones.
(6) Good fences are not the basis for good neighbors, although that idea seems deeply comforting to many people. “He moves in darkness as it seems to me,/Not of woods only and the shade of trees./He will not go behind his father’s saying,/And he likes having thought of it so well/He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
(7) Even when people seem incapable of looking beyond their walls, they need to figure out the alternative on their own. “I could say ‘Elves’ to him,/But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather/He said it for himself.
(8) Even when others are eager to build walls, you can still meet with them — now and again — and chat.
Along with the physical walls, both around countries and around local gated communities, intangible walls come in social and economic versions.
Social walls are built along many boundary lines: political party, race or ethnicity, neighborhood, nationality, religious affiliation (or lack of it), immigrant status, gender, sexual preference, education level, job status and others. The problems arise when we hunker down behind the barricades of our own group, secure in the presumption that there’s nothing to be learned from listening to those we have consigned to the other side.
Economic walls include those along national borders affecting international trade, but also the many ways in which the well-to-do and the nearly-very-rich limit access to the neighborhoods in which they live, the schools their children attend, the credentials and social networks that lead to many jobs, the health care providers they use and more.
In the June issue of the Atlantic, Matthew Stewart offered a provocative essay about economic walls built by “the 9.9 percent” — that is, not the top 0.1 percent, but the rest of the top 10 percent.
He writes: “[A]round the world and throughout history, the wealthy have … taken their money out of productive activities and put it into walls. Throughout history, moreover, one social group above all others has assumed responsibility for maintaining and defending these walls. Its members used to be called aristocrats. Now we’re the 9.9 percent.”
“But wait a minute,” I hear you say. “Of course, other people build walls because of close-mindedness, lack of empathy, bigotry and selfishness.
“But the walls are completely different that I erect between myself and those belonging to other political, religious, racial, ethnic, neighborhood, national, gender, sexual preference, and economic groups. My walls are a necessary act of self-defense.”
Such an argument isn’t always wrong, but it often seems lacking in self-reflection. It reminds me of one of the philosophical paradoxes of self-defense arguments.
Long ago, when an invading army was attacking a walled city, it would gather up noncombatants from the countryside and force them to march ahead of the army. When the leaders of the walled city saw the huge mob arriving, they would fire in self-defense, hitting the noncombatants in front. The (previous) noncombatants in front would then fire back, in their own self-defense.
Presto! You have a battle between two groups who both have a legitimate claim to be fighting in self-defense.
Before you push back twice as hard, it’s worth considering the possibility that those who bumped you were being pushed as well, by some combination of social and economic forces, together with charismatic leaders. And those who ultimately benefit from the battle are standing back behind the scenes.
I’m not a fortune cookie or a folk song, so I won’t blow the trumpets for all the walls to come a-tumbling down. We all need our boundaries, and sometimes the boundaries need defending.
But building walls has costs, and should be done only after due consideration. It’s not always the better angels of our nature that encourage us to build walls.
Wall-building often begins with bricks of authenticity, honesty and virtue, but at some point the construction materials shift to an exuberant and exhibitionistic boorishness. Are your walls giving you cover for searching out the motes in the eyes of others, while ignoring the beams in your own eye?
Are you building a wall or an echo chamber? Are you building a wall or a fortress? Are you building a wall as part of a base camp for future aggression?
Walls that are built with enthusiastic participation from both sides will be the strongest. When you build a wall, you might want to contemplate those who are most actively helping to construct that wall from the other side — and the extent to which you really wish to cooperate with them.
If you have an uncomfortable feeling that your walls are causing you to move in darkness, perhaps you could try letting them slide into disrepair — just a little, just for awhile — and allowing elves to sneak through the cracks.
Timothy Taylor is managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, based at Macalester College. He blogs at http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com.
_____________________
“Mending Wall”
By Robert Frost (1914)
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
From the Poetry Foundation website
(www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall).
Are you building a wall or an echo chamber?
Central Pennsyltucky
On a boat at a rocky promontory in Scotland, farmer James Hutton made an argument that changed our understanding of Earth’s age and helped establish the science of geology.
Central Pennsyltucky
Trump and Walker OK Plant Pumping Clean Lake Michigan Water and Then Dumping Polluted Water Back
Get paid to pollute!
That’s the unspoken new policy of the Trump administration and its ally in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker. Their administrations are giving environmental protection waivers together with billions of dollars in subsidies to Foxconn, the giant Taiwan manufacturer best known for assembling iPhones.
Foxconn will be allowed to suck up to 7 million gallons of water a day from Lake Michigan and then dump that water, which may be laced with pollutants from making liquid crystal display panels, back into the lake.
Local officials are aghast. They understand the dangers to health and tourism if America goes back to the pre-Nixon policies of treating the Great Lakes as an industrial toxic waste pond.
Foxconn has not revealed what toxic metals and chemicals will be used but said it plans to distill the water it uses to decrease water use and recycle water.
The Trump administration helped arrange a $10 billion deal for Foxconn, which has started construction in Mount Pleasant, a Racine County village of about 26,000 people. If fully built out the industrial complex would be three times the size of the Pentagon.
Gov. Walker exempted the Foxconn factory from any major environmental review. Last-minute changes by Trump political appointees at the EPA could keep Foxconn from making expensive improvements to reduce smog.
Action Box/What You Can Do About It
Call EPA Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler at 202-564-4700 to tell him your thoughts about protecting our Great Lakes or write him at EPA Headquarters / William Jefferson Clinton Building / 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW / Mail Code: 1101A / Washington, D.C. 20460
Midwest Environmental Advocates can be reached at 608-251-5047 or advocate@midwestadvocates.org
“We can protect our natural resources and support job creation at the same time,” said Ann Hasenberg, a Walker spokeswoman.
These pro-pollution favors are being challenged in court by Lisa Madigan, the Illinois attorney general.
Walker met with billionaire Terry Gou, the chairman of Foxconn Technology Group, in April 2017 in the office of Trump’s chief of staff. That meeting came just days after a White House aide called an executive at a Wisconsin economic development organization. The meeting between the two has been portrayed as part of the romance between Foxconn and Wisconsin that the company and the state claim will bring up to 13,000 jobs to Wisconsin. Notice that “up to.”
But the legalese and fine print underlying the deal suggest that Gou was more interested in how best to exploit our nation’s Great Lakes, home to a fifth of the world’s surface fresh water. Mount Pleasant is a “straddling community” only partly in the Great Lakes basin. Such communities can tap water from the Great Lakes provided the water is used “solely for public water supply purposes.”
Wisconsin, known under Walker for rarely enforcing its own standards for industrial water pollution, approved using water from Lake Michigan for the 22-million-square-foot industrial complex’s water needs.
Local officials understand the dangers if America goes back to treating the Great Lakes as an industrial toxic waste pond.
An LCD plant coats glass sheets with dozens of layers of thin material that conduct electricity. Washing the glass as each layer is applied uses millions of gallons of water.
Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources brought in a manager to oversee quick environmental permitting for Foxconn.
“We can get these jobs going on the ground and still have the environmental protection – and I will even say enhancement – as a result of this project,” Cathy Stepp, then the secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, said in 2017.
Stepp, who campaigned for Trump, later joined the EPA and is now a regional administrator in the Midwest for the EPA where her duties will include overseeing some of the chemicals used at Foxconn. The former deputy secretary at the Wisconsin DNR, Kurt Thiede, is now Stepp’s chief of staff.
Trump’s Army Corps of Engineers said it had no jurisdiction over wetlands that would be filled. Wisconsin gave up state authority over wetlands on the Foxconn property.
“Right now, we don’t have any authority on the site,” said Todd Vesperman, a Corps section chief.
Featured image: Polluted water at a Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, China (2012 photo by Jordan Pouille)
Dumping waste into Lake Michigan
Central Pennsyltucky
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