Donald Trump and Elon Musk Have Something in Common
Donald Trump and Elon Musk have something in common….
“It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones.”
For Elon Musk it is the organization of Twitter with 7,500 employees dedicated to ensuring he would never succeed in his takeover effort. From the board of directors to the data engineers who build the controlling algorithms, to the third-party service providers who manage the data demand, there are likely only a handful of people within the entire corporation who would welcome the type of change Elon Musk represents.
As a result of the scale of opposition, any organizational takeover would ultimately deliver a company filled with sleeper cells and activist agents who consider it their personal and ideological mission to destroy the social media platform rather than accept change. The purchase effort was doomed from the outset, considering Musk represented something akin to Rand Paul being nominated to lead the World Bank or Federal Reserve. Some stuff just isn’t possible.
We The People attempted the Musk route when we sent President Donald Trump into Washington DC. However, instead of one institution with 7,500 people, it was dozens of institutions housing hundreds of thousands of entrenched ideologues. Most MAGA voters did not realize it at the time because grade school civics was never updated with our post-9/11 political outcome.
Imagine what the 7,500 Twitter folks would do as employees within an institution they abhorred overnight. What scale of effort would be exhausted to kill baby Elon Hitler for the greater social good? You don’t have to go too far in your imagination, because that’s exactly how Washington DC reacted to Trump’s arrival.
From day one to day one-thousand-four-hundred-sixty-one, no opposition was too much opposition by anyone, in every institution and every branch – including both wings of the UniParty congress, upper and lower chambers.
The threat that Trump represented needed to be managed, attacked and ultimately removed. There were/are trillions at stake, and keep in mind, DC is the epicenter of the global financial universe. As a result, the financial foot-soldiers of almost every western nation were aligned to assist the DC system in removing the threat.
Sometimes I laugh at the hindsight of people who say Donald Trump had terrible judgement in his appointments. I snicker because these are the same people who said General James “Mad Dog” Mattis was the greatest military leader since George Washington. How did that role as defense secretary work out?
No wait, Trump could have done a better job against the 147,000 people in the United States Dept of State, extending like metastatic cancer around the globe from their primary origination point in foggy bottom DC.
Oh, I’m sure the Ron DeSantis advocates have a plan for that, just as assuredly as they can jump to the typeset to instruct Musk how to modify the personnel outlooks of the social media network. Something that involves the multi-billion global media corporations folding up shop to shift their ideological compass headings, right?
Maybe free cookies will help the kids who work 3 hours a week, smile as they adjust to a 40-hour expectation.
I’m told that Donald Trump also planned badly to take over the 90,000 employees and $8.7 billion payroll at the U.S. Dept of Justice. Trump should have listened to the advice of the esteemed and well-regarded senior Senator from deep red Alabama, Mr. Jeff Sessions, who was also praised effusively by the same conservative crowd who praised the Mad Dog. If only Trump had installed a great stalwart for conservative principles like Sessions. Alas, we lost the opp… wait, huh, no.. wait,.. I mean, what?
Former UN official Ric Grenell was awesome as the “acting” Director of National Intelligence. If only President Trump had nominated Grenell from the outset, instead of that insufferable DC insider from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Dan Coats, things would have been so much better.
With an ODNI confirmation from the same senate intelligence group that was trying to block Trump from ever reaching Washington DC, things would have been awesome. Hey, why is that “Acting” word always in front of Grenell anyway? Oh, wait, the “Republican” committee members wouldn’t what?
Alas, if Trump had only done a better job of hiring the 2,400 people who work for the White House, he would have avoided all of those horrible stealth terror cells who were in place to facilitate his removal. Surely it wouldn’t have taken him that long to go through the candidate pool and interview everyone willing to live within a 100-mile radius of the epicenter of morality and truthfulness known as Washington DC.
And boy did President Trump ever screw up with his 400+ staff National Security Council, who report to the National Security Advisor and come from every executive agency, including intelligence, to deliver wholesome and practical advice to the oval office holder they hated.
I’m sure Musk has a better plan to manage the Silicon Valley coders who design the algorithms at the Twitter. I mean, Musk and Ron DeSantis being all smarter than Trump would have a plan for stuff, right?
Speaking of “intelligence”, what was candidate Donald Trump thinking when he selected former Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his vice-presidential running mate? I mean everyone in the republican sphere of conservative politics hated Mike Pence in 2015 and 2016, knowing his conservative bona fides were a mask just waiting to drop and create havoc for the America-First agenda. I mean it’s not like everyone didn’t know Mr. Pence surrounded himself with liars, fabricators and political club staff who hated the Tea Party base. We all knew that in 2015 and 2016, right?
If only Donald Trump had hired the right kind of people within his administration, then the multinational global corporate media would not have needed to treat him like he was the walking personification of the antichrist. A few people here, and a few different people there, and everything would have gone swimmingly.
Many people know -to a demonstrable certainty- that Ron DeSantis has, right now, a list of about 200,000 people ready to move themselves directly into Washington DC and finally change the system for the better. I am certain this list exists because all the right crowd in conservative media tell me they are sure of it.
These betters are the people who would know such things because they knew Senator Ted Cruz was the reformist lightbringer in 2015. The word is that DeSantis uniquely carries the power to replace every corrupt republican member of the House and Senate simply by raising his chin a certain way when the sunlight glistens upon him.
It was the Fourth Quarter of 2019…..
….despite two years of doomsayer predictions from Wall Street’s professional punditry, saying Trump tariffs on China would create massive inflation…. It wasn’t happening!
Overall year-over-year inflation was hovering around 1.7 percent [Table-A BLS]; that was our inflation rate. The rate in late 2019 was firmed up with less month-over-month fluctuation, and the rate remained consistent. [See Below]
A couple of important points. First, unleashing the energy sector to drive down overall costs to consumers and industry outputs was a key part of President Trump’s America-First MAGAnomic initiative. Lower energy prices help the worker economy, middle class and average American more than any other sector.
Which brings us to the second important point. Notice how food price had very low year-over-year inflation, 0.5 percent. That is a combination of two key issues: low energy costs, and the fracturing of Big Ag hold on the farm production and the export dynamic:
(BLS) […] The index for food at home declined for the third month in a row, falling 0.2 percent. The index for meats, poultry, fish, and eggs decreased 0.7 percent in August as the index for eggs fell 2.6 percent. The index for fruits and vegetables, which rose in July, fell 0.5 percent in August; the index for fresh fruits declined 1.4 percent, but the index for fresh vegetables rose 0.4 percent. The index for cereals and bakery products fell 0.3 percent in August after rising 0.3 percent in July. (link)
For the previous twenty years food prices had been increasingly controlled by Big Ag, and not by normal supply and demand. The commodity market became a ‘controlled market’. U.S. food outputs (farm production) was controlled and exported to keep the U.S. consumer paying optimal prices.
President Trump’s trade reset was disrupting this process. As farm products were less exported the cost of the food in our supermarket became reconnected to a ‘more normal’ supply and demand cycle. Food prices dropped and our pantry costs were lowered.
The Commerce Dept. then announced that retail sales climbed by 0.4 percent in August 2019, twice as high as the 0.2 percent analysts had predicted. The result highlighted retail sales strength of more than 4 percent year-over-year. These excellent results came on the heels of blowout data in July, when households boosted purchases of cars and clothing.
The better-than-expected number stemmed largely from a 1.8 percent jump in spending vehicles. Online sales, meanwhile, also continued to climb, rising 1.6 percent. That’s similar to July, 2019, when Amazon held its two-day, blowout Prime Day sale. (link)
Despite the efforts to remove and impeach President Trump, it did not look like middle-class America was overly concerned about the noise coming from the pundits. Likely that’s because blue-collar wages were higher, Main Street inflation was lower, and overall consumer confidence was strong. Yes, MAGAnomics was working.
Additionally, remember all those MSM hours and newspaper column inches where the professional financial pundits were claiming Trump’s tariffs were going to cause massive increases in prices of consumer goods?
Well, exactly the opposite happened [BLS report] Import prices were continuing to drop:
This was a really interesting dynamic that no-one in the professional punditry would dare explain.
Donald Trump’s tariffs were targeted to specific sectors of imported products. [Steel, Aluminum, and a host of smaller sectors etc.] However, when the EU and China respond by devaluing their currency, that approach hit all products imported, not just the tariff goods.
Because the EU and China were driving up the value of the dollar, everything we were importing became cheaper. Not just imports from Europe and China, but actually imports from everywhere. All imports were entering the U.S. at substantially lower prices.
This meant when we imported products, we were also importing deflation.
This price result is exactly the opposite of what the economic experts and Wall Street pundits predicted back in 2017 and 2018 when they were pushing the rapid price increase narrative.
Because all the export dependent economies were reacting with such urgency to retain their access to the U.S. market, aggregate import prices were actually lower than they were when the Trump tariffs began:
[…] Prices for imports from China edged down 0.1 percent in August following decreases of 0.2 percent in both July and June. Import prices from China have not advanced on a monthly basis since ticking up 0.1 percent in May 2018. The price index for imports from China fell 1.6 percent for the year ended in August.
[…] Import prices from the European Union fell 0.2 percent in August and 0.3 percent over the past 12 months.
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