Before I ding the Donald, I’d like to speak words of praise for Penn State. In their first game, they handed Nevada a pounding. They shouldn’t expect the whole season to go that easily. I mean, it would be great, but…
The Lions backup quarterback had a great debut. Brought in the near the beginning the 4th quarter, Ethan Grunkemeyer (yes, that’s a real name) drove more than 80 yards, dominating the quarter, and scoring a TD. His next two possessions were not as productive. But I’m sure he went to the locker room feeling pretty damn good.
It was a bummer that the crowd wasn’t wearing predominantly white. And they have started using blue and white pompoms, which from the least distance look grey. In days of yore, home games at Happy Valley used to look as if it has snowed at Penn State. Now…it looks like any average stadium.
To business!
Okay, sports fans, I have been calling balls and strikes on The Donald in a very balanced fashion. In fact, I would suggest that I have put my thumb on the scale to favor Trump, more than once, by giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Take the tariff issue. I am and always will be an enemy of tariffs. They are an impediment to trade and make no economic sense in the long run. But I did say that if Trump is just lording tariffs over the heads of countries who have treated us terribly with trade (that’s is almost the entire developed world), and that he just wanted them to open their markets without artificial barriers, then I can get behind the message. We sell our stuff there, they sell their stuff here, no barriers, then great! I’m on board! Threaten the hell out of them!
BUT…my man is still talking about all the great revenue the GOVERNMENT will take in as a result of tariffs! That’s bullshit!!! Like the perpetual inflation, created by the Fed, with our government’s blessing, ranging from 2% to 13% during my lifetime, tariffs are just another tax ON US!!!! Don’t you get it?
We will see an uptick in employment and a sugar high from imposing tariffs. But when the dust clears and it’s all baked into market results and expectations, our position relative to the rest of the world will be right about where it was in December of 2020. Other countries will throttle their trade barriers for a bit, then go right back to shitting on American goods. Because WE TOLD THEM THEY COULD STRUCTURE THEIR ECONOMIES THAT WAY post-war.
So my patience and support for tariff talk is nearing an end. The Donald looks as if he really intends to centrally plan our trade policy. That will fail, perhaps not entirely during his first term (if we’re fucking lucky), but we will regret this total nonsense.
So what’s new?
Last week, Trump announced he was buying 10% of Intel? What? FUCKING WHAT!?!?! There is not, and never will be, a valid reason for the Government to dabble in private equities! EVER! Of all the issues I have railed against, of all the things that could possibly create the political whores who have wrecked this nation, crony capitalism is at the very TOP of the list. And the government holding stock in a company is THE most naked and corrupt form of crony capitalism!
Until now, here’s how crony capitalism worked. Corporations would find every crack in the system to avail political whores with money. They would give them union money, or stockholder money, and say, “We’re just bundling. Our people support Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi”…or whoever. Or they’d pay these whore to make speeches. That’s called an honorarium. Companies and governments around the globe paid BJ Bill up to half a million to give one of his vapid, pointless, boring 45 minutes speeches. OR…here’s where it gets real interesting…they’d make monstrous “donations” to a politician’s “foundation”.1 How thoughtful! BJ Bill’s wife was a wizard at shaking down foreign governments to pad her “foundation” for years.
In return, these cronies get unheard of tax considerations, contracts, endless wars (where people actually DIE to fuel their cash flow from our taxes) to sell their weapons, and government envoys to hawk their products overseas. This has been the order of business on Washington DC for generations. FDR put it on steroids. LBJ put it on rocket launchers. Then, B. Hussein Obama added a whole new twist.
Barry had a bunch of crony homies from Chi-Town who used to hang out the the White House. While they were all shooting hoops, while serious people were running the Administration (Jarrett, Klane, et al), this Chicago group would find a company or economic sector to wreck. This process would become known as Smash and Grab.2
This was the play. Barry would announce his displeasure with a company and talk about slamming the company with heavy regulatory interference. His buddies would watch the stock plummet. If it didn’t happen fast enough the pressure would be ratcheted up. When the stock was in the toilet, Barry’s buddies would swoop in and buy it at rock-bottom prices.
Then the all the original problems would magically disappear. The stock, with all the same fundamentals it had before, would quickly rise back to it’s previous place on the exchange. The crony/homies would make a killing.
I’m not saying Trump has any intention of doing anything like that. I think he sees this move as a way to amp up efforts to develop AI. An honorable motivation. But it does not justify the GOVERNMENT dabbling in PRIVATE equity. It means the government is putting its thumb on the scale. It means picking winners and losers, creating advantages and disadvantages for companies which are not government entities.
But MJ, you might exclaim, we did it in 2008! It’s what got us out of the housing market crash. But, but, but…what about Chrysler? To which I would answer we were going to come out the crash one way or another. We’d have eventually been made whole by the market. And if Chrysler was a failed company, they should have been allowed to fail. Ford and GM would have picked up what they wanted from the wreckage. And in both cases, just because the government can borrow or print the money to interfere with market forces in this way, doesn’t make doing so legitimate.
In fact, I would argue that setting such precedents has done far more harm then good. Where do you think Barry found the balls to take over the health insurance industry? (For the truly slow, ACA had nothing to do with actual healthcare. It had everything to do with putting 1/6th of the economy into government coffers and under government control.
With the 2008 bailout, we heard, for the first time, the word “trillion” actually discussed among otherwise normal human beings. Immediately, and ever since, a laundry list of political whores all wanted their name synonymous with the waste of trillions of dollars. That’s because there are still stupid Americans who measure the value of a politician by how much money he pisses down on their heads. Has ANY of that meant a trillion dollar improvement in anyone’s lives. NO! The lion’s share of ALL that money was pilfered, wasted or put into the pockets of “NGOs” or “non-profits”. None of whom did very much for ANY target issue.
Now, it will become fashionable, and seen as visionary, every time a hack says we need to buy stock in Home Depot or Walmart or Widgets, Inc., in order to accomplish X. We can use our influence to do it.
Well, if you want X, pass a law! If the free market wants X, you’ll get it whether you pass the law or not. If you want an X that people don’t want, verify it with a referendum. Or run your party’s candidates on the issue. But to simply buy influence in a favored company, who will pay themselves handsome bonuses with the money? No! Fuck No! We never should have tolerated this kind of dirty pool in the past, and shouldn’t now.
Remember RFK. Jr’s rules of politics. I’ve mentioned them before. Any power we grant a government, we will never take back. No matter how stupid the idea turns out to be. AND… a government will always abuse such power.
A hypothetical: That snake, Chuck Schumer might whisper that he intends to take up important legislation beneficial to Tesla. The first thing that will happen is all legislators in the club, in both parties, will buy up a mess of TSLA. Then the announcement comes. In order to ensure America remains the world leader in EVs and that Tesla does things as we want to see them done, Senate Bill XX25 says the US Government will buy a whole bunch of TSLA! In the meantime, Chuck’s niece, or golf buddy, or whoever is running his accounts, has already bought a shit ton of Tesla stock for Chuck, and certainly for themselves.
The idea of government playing the market is an anathema to a free market system. And after the first non-emergency test case, it will be used by the permanent governing class to line their pockets in ways even they never dreamed of. AOC will be a billionaire by 2030.
So, fight this. I want the US to lead the world in EVERYTHING. But I want that in a free market that sees my genius. With two exceptions I know of, cronies NEVER deliver what they say they will. And even if they do, it doesn’t make shit like buying Intel stock acceptable.
Finally…
…the Left is still running around protesting the decrease in crime, while claiming credit for it at the same time. This despite the fact that ALL crime centers in the US are BLUE dumps we euphemistically call cities.
And even tough it crushed them in ‘24, they are still saying boys and be girls, and girls can be boys, and we should mutilate them to facilitate it. E-I-E-I-O!
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Does AOC have a foundation? Who runs it? Did you know a foundation only has to give a small fraction of it’s money to whatever bullshit charity it claims to support? Did you know that the smarter politicians give their foundation money to “non-profits” run by friends and relatives? The reason I bring up AOC is because she is an amoral shit. Her wealth has increased by 1000 X’s since she came into office. That wasn’t a result of her stock market prowess. And it wasn’t because she has a nice ass (although she really does have a nice ass - or the spanks are killin’ it). So I think it’s long overdue that an intrepid reporter did a little digging into Cortez’s booty. And by that I DON’T mean her ass. I mean her cash flow. Do we have any intrepid reporters left in this country? Matt Taibbi is pretty busy right now.
Secret Empires by Peter Schweitzer
