POLITICUSUSA
The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal responded to former President Donald Trump after he criticized their coverage of him and his administration. The Journal, one of the more conservative nationally syndicated publications, said Trump is to blame for Republicans losing their Senate majority in the most recent election.
Watching the senate, under the callous and inhumane rule of Mitch McConnell, fail to respond sufficiently and urgently to the dire suffering and needs of out-of-work Americans, largely denying their reality, brought to mind a scene from American author William Dean Howells’ 1890 novel A Hazard of New Fortunes.
The reliably conservative Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board criticized President Donald Trump in an editorial this morning, calling his murder allegations against former congressman and “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough “ugly even for him.”
“Donald Trump sometimes traffics in conspiracy theories — recall his innuendo in 2016 about Ted Cruz’s father and the JFK assassination — but his latest accusation against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough is ugly even for him,” the board wrote.
They continued: “Mr. Trump always hits back at critics, and Mr. Scarborough has called the President mentally ill, among other things. But suggesting that the talk-show host is implicated in the woman’s death isn’t political hardball. It’s a smear. Mr. Trump rightly denounces the lies spread about him in the Steele dossier, yet here he is trafficking in the same sort of trash.”
The board concludes that its editorial is not written with “any expectation that Mr. Trump will stop. Perhaps he even thinks this helps him politically, though we can’t imagine how. But Mr. Trump is debasing his office, and he’s hurting the country in doing so.”
The Wall Street Journal‘s condemnation comes after the president
falsely accused
The conservative assault on women’s basic human rights just doesn’t stop.
And just as the GOP hired Arizona-based sex-crimes prosecutor Rachel Mitchell to serve as a kind of figleaf to cover the obscene nakedness of their shameful misogyny, we also see Republican-aligned women coming out in full force to play an identity-politics game geared toward masking the extreme anti-feminist ideology steeping the conservative political agenda.
If a woman says it, can it really be anti-woman?
I can hear now that swarm of white male Republican senators who hired Rachel Mitchell telling us, “Hey, some of our best commentators are women.”
Take conservative commentator Carrie Sheffield who recently published an opinion piece on CNN.com titled “Democrats Have Hijacked #MeToo for Political Gain.”
Positioning herself as a #MeToo supporter, she charges the democrats with having “hijacked #Me Too for political gain.” While lauding the movement for toppling serial sexual predators and harassers and advocating for and protecting the most vulnerable, she expresses concern that “the noble justice of #MeToo has been politically hijacked and weaponized, co-opted by Democrats seeking to extrapolate this just cause for liberal policies that go beyond equal and fair treatment for women.”
We really never get an answer in her column, which focuses on Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were both in high school, as to how pushing for the FBI to investigate these accusations goes beyond advocating for the “equal and fair treatment of women”? Doesn’t trying to ensure that someone appointed to the Supreme Court isn’t a sexual predator, misogynist, and liar a rather big deal when it comes to defending the “equal and fair treatment of women”? After all, appointing a justice who disrespects, maybe even hates, women wouldn’t bode well for guaranteeing the highest court in the land will decide law that protects women’s rights.
She does endorse a recent Wall Street Journal editorial titled “The Presumption of Guilt: The New Liberal Standard Turns American Due Process Upside Down,” in which the editorial board argues, with particular regard to Kavanaugh’s situation, that “the Democratic standard for sexual-assault allegations is that they should be accepted as true merely for having been made. The accuser is assumed to be telling the truth because the accuser is a woman. The burden is on Mr.
Kavanaugh
On Sunday we reported that “Trump’s trade war is hitting the agricultural Midwest hard as farmers in eight of the top ten soybean producing states that voted for Trump are going to be looking at bankruptcy as they are already being hurt by Trump’s trade war with China.”
We also said that Trump’s trade war was a “ticking time bomb” that was set to go off very soon once his ridiculous tariffs go into effect.
And now the venerable conservative newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, has demolished Trump in a new editorial lambasting the president’s decisions to impose 19th century trade restrictions on the global economy of the 21st century.
According to the Journal, Trump is killing the jobs of the people he had promised to protect. They also issued a warning to Republicans, saying that Trump will cause them to “take a beating at the polls in November.”
“Donald Trump’s trade war has been an abstraction for most Americans so far, but the retaliation has now begun in earnest and the casualties are starting to mount,” the editorial said.
After U.S. manufacturer Harley-Davidson announced they are moving jobs to Europe the Journal said that American workers are the biggest losers under Trump’s policies:
“President’s beloved stock market took another header Monday on news of more restrictions on investment into the U.S., and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is now down for 2018. But the biggest losers Monday were the American workers who make Harley-Davidson motorcycles whose jobs will soon be headed overseas thanks to the Trump tariffs.”
Celebrants of the recent tax bill have claimed, echoing Trump’s top economic advisors, that the massive corporate tax cut will indeed trickle down or, to mix metaphors, serve as the proverbial rising tide that will lift all boats.
CNBC’s Patti Domm was quick to validate this exuberant claim, pointing to announcements from Wells Fargo and Fifth Third bank that they will be raising their minimum wage to fifteen dollars per hour and from AT&T and Comcast that they will be showering their employees with bonuses. Other reporting on CNBC suggest it’s too early to tell, as many companies Fred Imbert and others reached out to hoping to forecast the impact of the corporate tax cut were more reticent about how this tax windfall will trickle down to employees, adopting a wait-and-see attitude.
Before we get too exuberant, let’s keep in mind not just recent history but also the longer arc of history in terms of the relationship between corporate profits and wages as well as the most basic dynamics of capitalism. The bottom line of capitalist dynamics is that higher corporate profits do not translate into higher wages. Indeed, higher profits have typically been achieved through lowering workers’ wages and benefits.
First, recent history: Remember when Trump lavishly offered up seven million dollars of taxpayer money to the Carrier corporation in order, supposedly, to persuade Carrier not to re-locate factories and jobs to Mexico? Trump generated a self-aggrandizing headline, but Carrier ended up still moving jobs to Mexico and eliminating over 600 jobs from the Indiana workforce.
That’s one reason not to get prematurely rapturous about corporate trickle down.
Another reason to be skeptical about corporate windfalls translating into rising wages is that since the 1950s we have seen corporations fare better and better while worker wages, including the minimum wage, have stagnated. Indeed, last March, well before the passage of this tax cut, The Economist reported, as part of its cover story, that corporate profits in the United States were in fact enjoying record performance.
So, given this record corporate performance in terms of profit generation, we should have already seen corporations raising wages, expending monies in capital and infrastructure investment, and showering generous bonuses on its employees.
If this scenario happened, I guess I missed it. Unfortunately, I didn’t miss it. It just didn’t happen.
And it likely won’t.
Indeed, at a meeting of the Wall Street Journal’s CEO council in early November, Gary Cohn asked CEO’s to raise their hands if the GOP tax cut proposed at the time would spur their companies to invest more and raise wages. In a moment Business Insider termed “awkward,” few CEO’s raised their hands, reinforcing the reporting of CNBC’s Fred Imbert.
These are not left-wing anti-capitalist ideologues doing this reporting. These are business journalists.
And these business journalists are just reporting the facts validated by the history of capitalism’s dynamics. The end game of corporate behavior is to increase profits, not to give money away charitably because they have it. In fact, corporations often push to lower wages and benefits to increase profits. They aren’t looking for any reason to raise wages.
Are we really supposed to be buying this bill of goods capitalist President Trump and the corporate bedfellows with which he has staffed his cabinet and advisors are trying to sell us?
They know full well how capitalism works. And corporations raising wages because profits and income increase ain’t how it works, and it never has been.
Take Trump himself. Recently Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort requested and was awarded 70 H-2B visas to hire foreign workers. According to Trump, John Bowden at The Hill reported, “It’s very, very hard to get people. Other hotels do the exact same thing.”
Really? Is that why Bowden also cited CareerSource spokesmen Tom Veenstra as highlighting, “We currently have 5,136 qualified candidates in Palm Beach County for various hospitality positions listed in the Employ Florida state jobs database.”
Free-market advocates typically oppose minimum-wage legislation, believing that the market should determine wages. Capitalists understand that corporate profits don’t determine wages but rather the dynamics of labor supply and demand do.
In the case of Mar-a-Lago’s hiring practices, Trump’s resort is deliberately trying to undermine the forces that raise worker wages by bringing in foreign workers—because that’s how capitalism works. Corporations, like Carrier and Trump’s businesses, seek to pay the lowest wages possible.
So, if history is any indicator, as it typically is, the dynamics of capitalism won’t change, such that we cannot expect increased corporate profits and income to translate to better treatment and higher pay for workers.
Such a scenario would defy the logic of capitalism, as Carrier and Mar-a-Lago demonstrate. And our capitalist President, his cronies, and the Republican Congress are simply lying about this reality of which they in their wealth are well-aware.
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