Tag: Heritage Foundation

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Hiding Bad News — But the hand basket is still going to hell

Hiding Bad News

But the hand basket is still going to hell

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 14th, 2025

Karoline Leavitt, the stooge tasked with saying things that even El Presidente would be embarrassed to utter, said the other day that monthly job reports may be suspended “until they get the data and methodology in order.”

It’s a bit like suspending climatology reports from NOAA while they investigate to find out if thermometers can really measure temperature. It comes just a couple of weeks after the Trump clown show fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for issuing a weak jobs report. They want to replace him with a libertarian hack from the Heritage Foundation willing to praise the Glorious Capitalistic Five Year Plan of Noble Leader. Sure. Minus ten percent unemployment! Take that, Obama!

The administration may not notice this little economic tidbit that came out yesterday because it isn’t as easy to understand as the unemployment rate or the inflation index: sales of cardboard shipping boxes dropped last quarter to the lowest level seen since 2001. That, in turn, is a strong indicator of anticipated shipping activity, which in turn is a central indicator of overall economic activity. A drop that big suggests people in charge of shipping are anticipating a sharp downturn.

I suspect that this administration is going to be shutting down every economic metric they can lay their hands on in order to tell reassuring lies about the state of the economy. I expect us to be in a recession by the end of the year (actually sooner, but you need three consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth before you are officially in a recession) and quite possibly in a depression by mid 2026.

Trump and his stooges honestly believe that people who go grocery shopping every week won’t notice inflation, or that more of their friends and neighbors might be out of work. Even sillier is the belief that businesses and factories will play along with fake “sunshine and roses” economic reports even though it’s costing them billions.

In addition to the utterly foolhardy tariffs regime, the Trump administration is working to remove all the economic governors put in place during and after the FDR “New Deal” to stop the economic boom-and-bust cycle. At a time when a move is under way to completely revamp what is taught in America as ‘history,’ the country’s real economic history, already downplayed massively, will probably vanish altogether.

A lot of people these days think of the Great Depression as something of an outlier, something huge and horrible that has been solved by enlightened business practices.

In the days before economic reform produced “the mixed economy” (nowadays called “Democratic Socialism”) depressions occurred every 10-15 years. Each one threw thousands of banks and other businesses out of existence, impoverishing and ruining the lives of millions. While we don’t have the numbers, it’s safe to assume that in any given depression, unemployment reached anywhere from 10 to 25% of the work force. Thousands of mortgages were foreclosed, many farms and small businesses failed. Inflation wasn’t a factor then because the value of the dollar was tied to gold, but it meant recovery was much more gradual and painful. The static value of the dollar CAUSED some depressions!

The New Deal reforms worked. The US went into the era of greatest economic growth in its history between 1934 and 1980, and by the 60s economists were beginning to hope the boom-and-bust cycle, already far milder than it ever had been, might be gone forever. (The math behind that cycle is strikingly similar to the math that explains the caterpillar-like motion of traffic jams.)

Unfortunately, the wealthy became convinced of their own wisdom and infallibility because, after all, they’re rich, aren’t they? In their eyes, it stood to reason that if they got richer, that would prove the system worked, and so let’s lift all those boats, baby! The economic poison of “supply-side economics” (aka “trickle down”) was born. It indisputably lifted the yachts.

The economy still grew, but most of that growth went to the top 1%. This created an imbalance of wealth and power, similar to such imbalances in 1780s France or 1910s Russia.

Such times are referred to as “end-stage capitalism.” The ceaseless concentration of wealth eventually leads to massive melt-downs, economic, social, and political. Most involve government collapse and/or violent revolution.

Trump’s policies are greatly accelerating that process, and like many other vain and foolish plutocrats before him, he hopes he can make the warning signs of the looming catastrophes go away simply by removing the tools used to measure the economy.

It’s a bit like solving climate change by banning the use of thermometers. And Trump is the guy who wanted to ease the COVID crisis by stopping testing.

It won’t work. Government metrics didn’t exist in all the other times of major economic upheaval, but then, people didn’t need them to know food was expensive, jobs were scarce, and everything was going to hell in a hand basket.

Economic convulsions are coming. All Trump is managing is to avoid letting people get any warning when they do come. But he thinks that they won’t notice when it happens because he didn’t tell them.

That will be the death of his movement.

Unfortunately, it could also be the death of many of the rest of us.

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This Week’s Pravda — Talking points for non-thinkers

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

May 29th 2025

Every one in a while some right winger gets up on its hind legs and tries to pretend it can think.

Almost always it’s a cut-and-paste job from some flak at the Heritage Foundation or similar propaganda pit, as this one is. This one has all the elements one might expect: punching down while howling ‘victimhood,’ combined with ludicrous rationales, scapegoating, and flat-out lies. Propaganda 101. Let’s look at this week’s crop, shall we?

1. Accept the fact that this is the leadership that we working, middle class Americans wanted. We are pulling the economic weight in this country and we are tired of pulling the weight of those that do not contribute.

Chances that the author of this piece is anywhere near middle-class are pretty slim. But like all libertarians, he conflates society with a business. Businesses can be efficiently heartless and throw their unproductive elderly and infirm off on an ice floe to die. But societies don’t work that way. Societies take care of the elderly, children, the chronically ill and the otherwise disabled. We aren’t Nazis. The Nazis were very efficient. But you wouldn’t want to live and die under them.

2. If you haven’t already, get a job. Every business in the country is hiring. And you get paid for the work you do. And the harder you work and the more you learn, the faster you will advance and the more you will earn. It’s an amazing concept.

Unemployment is at 4%. That means nearly everyone who can work is, and there aren’t many jobs to be had. I know they are talking about work requirements for Medicaid recipients, but the fact is that 65% of them ARE working, and the rest can’t. The “amazing concept” is just cruelty and unconcern.

3. Understand that if you are a citizen or a legal alien that you are not going to get deported! I don’t care what CNN says.

Flat out lie. Right now there is a four year old American girl whose guardians are frantically fighting her deportation because she has an illness that will kill her in days without treatment available only in America. There are dozens of instances of people, both American born and with green cards being sent to Donald’s for-profit gulag in El Salvador. Are we supposed to believe those dozens of court cases concerning illegal deportation the government is losing aren’t real?

4. Tariffs are a bargaining chip. When you are in business you make deals, and sometimes you have to play hardball. That’s how you get the deals you desire.

TACO Donald is playing hardball with a Nerf ball, it seems. His tariffs are wild, capricious, illogical and have cost the country hundreds of billions. Now a court has slapped him flat, ruling that he has no authority to levy tariffs in the first place. But immense damage has been done. In the eyes of the world, America has become a bad joke.

5. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects you from discrimination by age, sex, race, etc. DEI openly violates this. Democrats want you to believe the opposite is true because they value your vote more than your quality of life.

All DEI ever did was ensure that jobs didn’t go to unqualified white males. Republicans hate the Civil Rights Act and want to get rid of it. You can’t justify “DEI” to erase the roles of women and other minorities in history and science. They even tried to erase Jackie Robinson’s military history and mention of the Tuskegee Airmen. It’s a reinstatement of Jim Crow bigotry, nothing more and nothing less.

6. It’s not the government’s money, it’s your money. You absolutely should give a damn about how it is spent.

Let’s see here. Four point three trillion in tax cuts, 101% of which goes to the wealthy. A tax INCREASE for those making $17,000 a year. Meanwhile, $700 billion in cuts to Medicaid, and a drive to make Social Security more “efficient” by making it harder to claim benefits. They claimed widespread fraud and audited 110,000 “suspect” cases. They found two—yes, single digit two—cases of suspected fraud. I’ll replace item six this way: “It’s your money, and the government is taking it from you and giving it to the rich.”

7. We are not the World Bank. If other countries need help they should raise their own finances. I don’t recall receiving any hurricane relief money from India or China.

And now we aren’t getting any hurricane relief from the United States, either. Trump cut off aid for last year’s storms in North Carolina. Oh, and he wants to close FEMA. But foreign aid, which made up less than one percent of the budget, was an invaluable tool for maintaining American influence and support throughout the world. Yes, China is more than happy to step in and replace us.

8. Drill baby, drill. Want to know why? Because we have it. Are electric cars the future? Not in their current form. There is way more oil in the ground than lithium, and guess where most of that is? China. Want food prices to come down? Then energy costs have to come down. And that means oil, gas, coal, and nuclear. Unicorn farts won’t power a factory.

Aside from the fact that oil production was at an all time high under Biden and prices still went up, there’s the fact that the multinational corporations do it for profit, and not for gas at $1.98, as Donald is claiming it is. Filthy fuels are still on their way out, and even though Tesla fell apart under the misrule of Elon Musk, other companies have surpassed Tesla in economy, range, price and reliability. And we’ve found large reserves of lithium in the US.

9. The economy and the security of the country are far more important than your feelings, get over it.

If everyone is broke and nobody trusts or respects the government any more, then you’re going to find yourself on the outside looking in. The one thing libertarians never understand: the economy exists to support the society. The society doesn’t exist to support the economy. Get over it.

10. There are men and there are women. Simple as that.

I’ll pass on the biology debate for now. Biology isn’t my strong suit, but I can still mop the floor with the ignorant bigot who wrote that. Human gender is far more fluid than most people realize, and human sexuality is another entire universe. Visit any large porn site to learn just how quaint and parochial your interests really are. Remember; the social rules of East Podunk are not the natural laws of the universe. I suspect the only thing the author knows about women is that he can’t get one.

11. Education is to establish a learning core that prepares a child for the real, working world. Anything else is wrong.

So we should only educate people to be mindless drones in service to the economy? If you think education is failing you now, wait until you are dealing with people who know even less, but aren’t happy with your rule!

12. Donald J. Trump is the President of the United States and he won in a mathematical landslide. Get over it.

Trump won by 1.6% of the vote, and less than a third of eligible voters voted for him. In an election not owned by billionaires, gerrymandered to death in the House, and with Jim Crow-like restrictions on so-called “voter fraud” Trump would have been laughed off as a bad joke back in 2015.

Copied from another post.

Of course. People who can’t read or think are the TARGET, not the source of this malarky!

 

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The Supine Court Strikes — What is this silly ‘law’ stuff, anyway?

The Supine Court Strikes

What is this silly ‘law’ stuff, anyway?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

April 26th, 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

The Heritage Foundation, or as I like to call them, the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues, represents a broken and twisted philosophy, a sick combination of fascism and Christian reconstructionalism. So it’s no surprise that their hirelings are also broken and twisted creatures.

Take the six “justices” that the Foundation lied, cheated and stole in order to infiltrate the Supreme Court. That suborned court is presently pretending to “deliberate” over whether a President or former president has absolute legal immunity for any actions taken while holding office.

They spent this week, after weeks of absurd delay, quibbling with lawyers over whether a president could be held accountable for “official acts” versus personal misdeeds. It’s a distinction without a difference; if it is an illegal act, then by definition it is not an official act. Presidents are required to “faithfully execute the laws of the United States.” Their own constitutional job description deems illegal acts to be outside the duties and responsibilities of the office. Were he not so hopelessly corrupt, even the befuddled and pampered pet of billionaires, Clarence Thomas, would be able to discern that. (Slappy made one real contribution to the proceedings, wanting to know if the appointment of Jack Smith as special prosecutor was legal. It didn’t have anything to do with this case, and I’m sure his wife, Gin Soaked, put him up to it. I doubt he has the wit to think of it for himself.)

The court will doubtlessly remand this case to the lower courts, who already made their decision loud and clear. Stripped of the legal niceties, they perceived the claim of absolute right of presidents to be a huge load of utter rubbish and about as unAmerican as it gets. But remanding it means the court gets to pretend to ‘consider’ it again no sooner than October, and can wait until five months after the election to decide if Trump can be held liable for his many crimes or not.

Yes, the true purpose of all this is to delay the various trials of Donald Trump until after the election. If the Heritage Foundation can only steal this coming election the way they stole the last five of six elections that produced a Republican president, then they can grandly declare the Republican President has the divine right of kings and end this democracy nonsense once and for all. But they can’t do that right now. After all, that would be giving BIDEN unlimited power and he might use it to order the Supreme Court (well, two thirds of it) taken out and shot, or Trump assassinated. (Assassinating Trump is pretty much redundant at this point; he’s well topped himself with his ongoing antics and clear lack of power in the court and on his silly vanity social media.)

Trump cannot possibly win a fair election. The primaries show that a full third of Republican voters want anyone other than Trump. He has only 30% support from independents and that’s plummeting in the face of Trump’s weakness and culpability on display in the ongoing trial. But the Heritage Foundation, with the backing of most of America’s 850 billionaires, is working hard to keep Republicans in control of government, or, failing that, to at least have enough votes in the gerrymandered House and corn-and-sagebrush-weighted Senate to keep a second Biden term paralyzed and ineffectual. (Most people still don’t understand how fantastic the accomplishments of the first Biden term—the roaring economy, the explosion of manufacturing jobs, the rise of unions and wages—were, despite the unending efforts of Republicans to subvert and deny such accomplishments.)

Thanks to the power of propaganda, people still blame Democrats for the economy (always better under Democratic administrations), the debt (90% of which came from Republican policies and misadventures) and the border (a non-crisis that is exacerbated by Republican refusal to consider legislation that they themselves introduced to try and codify American policy toward refugees.)

Never mind Trump’s lies and bullshit. The far more dangerous ones are the ones promoted endlessly on the propaganda outlets like Faux News and church pulpits.

How effective is it? The Republicans have taken out the old Reagan chestnut “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” and are running on it, despite the obvious and clear evidence that virtually everyone, including the people asking that question, are in fact better off now than they were four years ago when hundreds of thousands were dying of COVID, unemployment was more than double what it is now, and the president was a psychotic liar.

Stolen elections? They’ll have you think it’s Democrats. But if you look at people indicted and convicted of election or voter fraud, nearly all of them are Republicans. Which party has administration officials facing trial for falsifying election certifications?

Even as Trump disintegrates, expect a blizzard of lies and hate from the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues. To them, the brass ring is nearly in grasp. They only need one final election to seal the deal, and erect the Christian Fascist state they dream of, where workers are powerless and frightened, consumers are captive and utterly at the mercy of merchants, minorities of all kinds dehumanized and cut off from society, and questioning any of this is not only treason, but sacrilege.

They almost have America. They can taste it.

And once they have it, they don’t plan to share it with you.

America won’t be yours.

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Goodbye, Super Tuesday — Who Could Hang a Game on You?

Goodbye, Super Tuesday

Who Could Hang a Game on You?

(apologies to Mick Jagger)

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

March 7th 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

The most pointless primary season since primaries began has ground to an effective end, and oh, my gosh, can you believe this? Biden and Trump will be their respective party’s nominees! Whoa! Did you see that coming?

Well, of course you did. You’re not an idiot.

Cable channels devoted hours to covering this non-story, with on-air journalists declaring solemnly that with the polls closed just two minutes earlier, the results were “too close to call.” It was a bit like watching Walter Cronkite narrate a Popeye cartoon and pretend feverishly that Bluto was by far the leading candidate in the race, but it wasn’t over yet! It was pretty sad. Speaking of cartoons, I switched off MSNBC and watched cartoons instead. Even Steve Kornacki couldn’t wring any drama out of the vote count. The only upsets were in DC and Vermont, where Trump managed to lose to Haley. Which showed that in two corners of the country, the majority of Republicans still hold three-digit IQs.

They were glaring exceptions. Most of the polling showed that the former political party known as the Republicans have been fully subsumed by the Nutzis and Nazis. In North Carolina, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson was selected to run for governor of the state. He’s a holocaust denier, a 9/11 truther, quotes Hitler, and wants to strip gays and other gendered people of all rights. And like most of what’s left of his party, he believes humanity begins at conception and ends at birth. He’s a raving nut, not to put too fine a point on it. In Alabama, they chose “justice” Sarah Stewart on Tuesday as their nominee to lead the state Supreme Court. She was one of the judges who ruled that frozen embryos were persons. In California, Steve Garvey, who played first base for the Dodgers for many years up until about forty years ago, came in second in the Senate primary in the state’s free-for-all vote where the top two vote getters are the nominees, even if they are both from the same party—as often happens in a state where the GOP is moribund. Garvey came in second, partly from name recognition (he was a good ball player) and party because Adam Schiff and other Democrats actually PROMOTED Garvey’s campaign, reasoning that he would be easier to beat in the General than Katie Porter or Barbara Lee would be. While he only beat Garvey by a percentage point, it’s important to note that nearly all of the 34% who voted for someone else are Democrats, and probably as much as a third of Garvey’s vote came from Democrats as well. This was probably a kind of a high-water mark for the GOP, since Garvey at least is sane and not a full-blown fascist. By GOP standards, that makes him a fairly respectable candidate.

So now the real fight begins, and despite the on-going dissolution of Donald Trump, it is a serious fight, with the fate of the country at risk.

Trump, in and of himself, is a fading risk. He clearly is suffering from dementia. He only occasionally remembers who the president is, and one of the times he got it right, he wound up endorsing him instead of himself.

But there are a lot of bad actors about, and they are very willing to lie, cheat, steal and commit any fraudulent acts possible to win. The Heritage Foundation (i.e., The National Association of Zealots and Ideologues) openly flaunts its “Project 2025” which starts by eliminating civil service laws to protect Americans from the spoils system, and allows Trump to fire and replace all federal employees with his own loyalists. An Ayn Rand nightmare, it would eliminate the Departments of Commerce and Education, nearly all environmental laws, and “deploy the military for domestic law enforcement and directing the DOJ to pursue Trump adversaries.” A fascist coup, in other words.

They also promote in full the demands of the vile anti-American zealots that call themselves “Christian Nationalists,” eliminating rights to abortion or contraception, the right to be gay or other-gendered, and eliminating separation of church and state, eliminating rights for all but a small percentage of Christians.

They are spending billions through their vast propaganda network, backed by the pack of Australian Nazis who run Fox News.

Bad actors abound. The Republicans, at Trump’s behest, deliberately scrapped the immigration bill that they themselves wrote, in order to try to keep “the border crisis” a campaign issue. Fox and other minutes are having five-minutes-of-hate sessions every half hour to keep the haters and bigots stirred up.

The House Republicans have nearly all co-sponsored HR 431, which declares that personhood begins at conception and thus abortion and birth control are murder.

Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia plan to slash oil production, hoping to drive up prices which the public, at the behest of the extreme right, will blame Biden for. They already have senile stooges like Trump and Chuck Grassley declaring that Biden “slashed oil production” and so prices will rise. The fact is US domestic oil production is the highest it has been in history. Meanwhile, does anybody believe Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russian want Trump because “he will stand tall for America.” Or do they just want a moronic and treasonous dupe? Which makes more sense to you? Viktor Orbán has become a major figure in GOP circles, and I’m sure he does it because he just loves America, right?

But Republicans are liars. Remember that. What ever it is, they will lie about it. Immigrants have lower crime rates, less gun violence, and add a net $40 billion to the economy. The liars on Fox News say otherwise, of course.

It’s going to get ugly, and fast. They already busted a string of websites yesterday purporting to be local news outlets that were actually run by Russia to interfere in election coverage. That happened yesterday. Google “Florida Observer” for details.

Remember: Republicans lie, and a vote for Trump is a vote for Treason.

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Return to Oz: In Australia, $7.75 an hour is for children

Return to Oz

In Australia, $7.75 an hour is for children

 

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 26th 2013

 

About 18 months ago, I wrote about Australia’s minimum wage laws, and with Congress poised to reject out of hand a presidential suggestion that the minimum wage should be raised to $9 an hour in the world’s richest country, it’s time to revisit Australia.

I wrote at the time, “Australia passed the Fair Work Act of 2009, which took effect in the form of the National Employment Standards on January 1, 2010. The act covers roughly 2/3rds of Australia’s workers (about 27% of the workforce are deemed “casual workers” defined by a tautology; they are called casual workers because they are paid as casual workers). Some of the provisions are, by American standards, utterly amazing.”

The minimum wage was $569.90 per week, then. Now it’s $606.40, based on a 38 hour work week, or $15.96 an hour. “Casual employees” (part timers) get a minimum of $21.66 an hour, which encourages employers to hire full-time workers and save money.

Continue reading “Return to Oz: In Australia, $7.75 an hour is for children”

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