The Trump Economy: Profits Vs. Wages

The con in graph form:

BREAKING: New corporate profit data shows just how corrupt the Republican tax bill really was. #CultureOfCorruption pic.twitter.com/d8d0uzTXmH

— CAP Action (@CAPAction) August 29, 2018

Monday Reading

As always, please follow the links to the full articles/ op eds.

Looks like Elon Musk isn't such a nice person at all:

While the rest of the world celebrated the rescue of 12 Thai boys and their soccer coach trapped in a cave in northern Thailand this week, Elon Musk is still mad his plan to help out didn’t work. And he’s throwing a fit on Twitter — he baselessly accused one of the British divers involved in the mission of being a pedophile. 

Here’s what happened: 63-year-old British caver Vern Unsworth, who according to CNN played an instrumental role in rescuing the team, criticized Musk in an interview with the network this week for his attempted involvement in the mission. As the saga was unfolding, Musk said that his companies SpaceX and the Boring Company would help rescue the boys. He proposed creating an “air tunnel underwater.” Musk also had engineers from SpaceX and Tesla build and test a mini-submarine for the boys to escape, but it was never used. 

Unsworth in an interview with CNN said Musk’s submarine was “just a PR stunt” and had “absolutely no chance” of working. “He can stick his submarine where it hurts,” he said. 

Musk in a series of tweets reacted to Unsworth’s assessment. He said he “never saw this British expat guy” and mentioned a rescue video that he said could refute his remarks. 

But then, Musk went a step further, saying not to “bother” showing the video and calling Unsworth a “pedo guy” — as in, accusing him of being a pedophile.

Unsworth is considering suing Musk. We wish him well.

And Musk's a big donor to Republican PAC "Protect the House":

Filings show that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO donated $33,900 to the PAC, which is dedicated to keeping Republicans in control of Congress. The PAC raised over $8 million in quarter two, according to filings compiled by ProPublica. 

The top donors of the PAC include Sheldon Adelson, the Vegas casino magnate, and Robert McNair, the owner of the NFL's Houston Texans. Although Adelson and McNair's contributions far outweighed Musk's — Adelson and McNair each gave $371,500 respectively, while Musk gave $33,900 — Musk was one of the top 50 donors of the PAC.

When you're putting up money to keep spineless Trump bots in office so they can protect him and do further damage to our country, you don't even need those Musk tweets to know this guy is an asshole.

The scam worked (but not for Trump chumps):

Six months after the Tax Cut and Jobs Act became law, there's still little evidence that the average job holder is feeling the benefit. 

Worker pay in the second quarter dropped nearly one percent below its first-quarter level, according to the PayScale Index, one measure of worker pay. When accounting for inflation, the drop is even steeper. Year-over-year, rising prices have eaten up still-modest pay gains for many workers, with the result that real wages fell 1.4 percent from the prior year, according to PayScale. The drop was broad, with 80 percent of industries and two-thirds of metro areas affected. 

"Now, economic confidence has been good, we're in a strong economy, GDP is growing, but the question has been, where's the paycheck?" said Katie Bardaro, vice president of data analytics at PayScale.   

The answer is, largely, in the companies' coffers. Businesses are spending nearly $700 billion on repurchasing their own stock so far this year, according to research from TrimTabs. Corporations set a record in Q2, announcing $433 billion worth of buybacks — nearly doubling the previous record, which was set in Q1.

Trump chumps will continue to willingly play the sucker as long as they see him hating on the same people they hate and fear.

Friday's indictments of a dozen Russian operatives provided yet another nail in the despicable Seth Rich conspiracy coffin:

On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks published more than 44,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee. On August 12, DCLeaks — a since-shuttered website used as a testing ground of sorts for dumping emails — posted more material, including a picture of former first lady Michelle Obama’s passport and emails from associates of Hillary Clinton. 

Reporters had already determined back in March that Guccifer 2.0 — the hacker who reportedly sent a “major trove of the #DCCC materials and emails to #wikileaks” — was actually believed to be a Russian intelligence officer. And Friday’s indictments make it clear — both Guccifer and DCLeaks were part of a Russian intelligence operation to influence the 2016 presidential election and swing it to Donald Trump. 

But the fever swamps of the far right argued that somehow Seth Rich, who was shot to death about a block from where he lived in Washington, DC, on July 10, 2016, was the real source of the Wikileaks emails, saying that Seth, who worked at the DNC as the director of voter expansion data, was a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders and thus leaked the emails to help Sanders just before the Democratic National Convention was to take place. 

None of this was true. [snip] 

But that didn’t stop some of the biggest names in right-wing media from pushing the story — even after Seth’s family demanded that they stop. In the Washington Post op-ed, Joel and Mary Rich wrote about their ordeal. “Imagine that every single day, with every phone call, you hope it’s the police, calling to tell you that there has been a break in the case. Imagine that instead, every call that comes in is a reporter asking what you think of a series of lies or conspiracies about the death. That nightmare is what our family goes through every day.”  (our emphasis)

Sean "Heil" Hannity was the most rabid purveyor of this destructive red herring. He had some help, though, from none other than the odious serial adulterer Newt Gingrich, who was asked this:

In light of the Mueller indictments, I called @newtgingrich to see if he would like to apologize to the Seth Rich family for peddling the conspiracy theory that Rich was killed for supposedly leaking the DNC docs to Wikileaks.

"No. Goodbye!" Gingrich told me before hanging up. https://t.co/hhy10ru7MN

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) July 13, 2018

Expecting decency from the indecent is a fool's errand.

Lastly, we highly recommend you go over to Infidel 753's link round- up for one of the best collections of links to stories, tidbits and "interesting stuff" he found on the Internet in the past week or so.

The Fraud Of Trump's Tax Cuts

Last December, when sociopathic con man and pathological liar Donald "Rump" Trump celebrated his massive tax giveaway to corporations and the top 1% in front of grinning Rethuglican members of Congress, they mistakenly believed it would be a big winner with the public. After all, they had sold their trickle down, supply side tax policy for over 30 years to large, gullible swaths of the public before, even though it created massive deficits and never produced the prosperity it promised. Why not go for it again? The Rethugs tried to make it an issue in the spring primaries against Dems in districts that they should have retained, but they failed. They found that people losing their health insurance, or seeing rates rise as a result of Rump's personal, malignant attack on Obama's Affordable Care Act is far more important.

Writing in American Prospect, William Rice explains how the corporate "raises and bonuses" were temporary PR moves demanded by Rump of corporations eager to please the vengeful clown in the White (Supremacist) House, while giving workers virtual crumbs from their massive windfall. For example, media giant Comcast got Rump's appointees to kill net neutrality after it offered $1,000 one-time bonuses to 100,000 employees. A big publicity blitz by Rethugs followed the December announcement, with too many complicit media outlets going along:

"Maybe, just maybe, the GOP and their big-money supporters had been right when they claimed corporate tax cuts help the little guy.

It proved to be a tough sell. Tax cuts are traditionally popular (who doesn’t like free money?), but opponents of this bill had done a good job letting people know it was the rich and corporations who gained from the new law, not working families—millions of whom would actually pay higher taxes once the law was fully phased in. The bill was so unpopular that for the first time in recent legislative history, not a single Democrat—not even conservative senators up for re-election in states Trump won—voted for a Republican tax cut.

Indeed, the very necessity of the corporate bonus propaganda campaign was itself a sign of the Tax Act’s toxicity. After 35 years of trickle-down, supply-side orthodoxy (only occasionally broken by lapses into more sensible policies), Americans were all too aware of the stagnant wages, widening economic inequality, and neglected public needs that resulted. They had understandably become weary, wary, and wise. Corporations knew that this time they would have to show them the money up front." (our emphasis)

Now, the realization is spreading that these "raises and bonuses," if delivered at all, were the smallest of small potatoes:

"While anyone less wealthy than Trump and his cabinet would find an unexpected bonus of $1,000 a welcome surprise, the bonuses were—relatively speaking and in the proper context—crumbs. And they’re crumbs that few workers are actually receiving...[Americans for Tax Fairness] has determined that as of mid-June, only 4 percent of workers have received any kind of tax-cut-related bonus or raise (and by dollar value, two-thirds are one-time bonuses and only one-third are ongoing wage increases). Belying the idea that workers were sharing deeply in the tax-cut bonanza, those payouts represented less than 10 percent of the companies’ savings from the new law. The biggest corrective of all to the feel-good bonus propaganda is that wealthy shareholders (including a healthy dollop of foreign investors) are projected to get 69 times as much from stock buybacks this year as American workers will get from bonuses or raises—$484 billion versus about $7 billion." (our emphasis)

As with everything Rump and his supine Congressional cultists touch, it's reverse Midas. The hole blown in the deficit will mean higher consumer prices (coupled with his tariff idiocy) and enormous debt into the future, while providing an excuse for Republican cuts to social welfare programs. Quite the bonus.

(photo: J. Ernst/Reuters. Rump and his gang celebrate enriching themselves.)