Hawley, Sanders Introduce Bill to Curb Credit Card Interest

On Tuesday, February 4th, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced bipartisan legislation to immediately cap credit card interest rates at ten percent for five years. The legislation follows President Trump’s campaign promise of a ten percent interest rate cap.

“Working Americans are drowning in record credit card debt while the biggest credit card issuers get richer and richer by hiking their interest rates to the moon. It’s not just wrong, it’s exploitative. And it needs to end,” Senator Hawley said. “Capping credit card interest rates at 10%, just like President Trump campaigned on, is a simple way to provide meaningful relief to working people. Let’s do it.”

“During the campaign, President Trump pledged to cap credit card interest rates at ten percent,” Senator Sanders said. “Today, I am proud to be introducing bipartisan legislation with Senator Hawley to do just that. When large financial institutions charge over 25 percent interest on credit cards, they are not engaged in the business of making credit available. They are engaged in extortion and loan sharking. We cannot continue to allow big banks to make huge profits ripping off the American people. This legislation will provide working families struggling to pay their bills with desperately needed financial relief.”

The Sanders-Hawley bill comes after a recent Forbes report found that the average credit card interest rate is 28.6%, despite banks' ability to borrow money from the Federal Reserve at less than 4.5%. Exorbitant interest rates and sky-high fees have allowed credit card companies to make enormous profits, supplying their executives with generous compensation at the expense of hard-working Americans.  

 

Supreme Court Rules States Can’t Remove Trump from Ballot

On Monday, Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft lauded the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to reject the idea that election authorities have the discretion to remove candidates from the ballot. This unprecedented case, Donald J. Trump v. Norma Anderson, centered on whether the 14th Amendment of the Constitution could bar President Trump from appearing on the ballot in Colorado and other states. 

“I will always work to preserve and protect the right of voters to decide for themselves who will represent them on the ballot,” said Ashcroft. “This was a frivolous effort to weaponize the 14th Amendment.” 

Ashcroft, a licensed attorney in Missouri, led a coalition of 10 other secretaries of state who signed on to an amicus brief he filed with the court. As well, Ashcroft traveled to Washington, D.C. to attended the Supreme Courts oral arguments in the case.

“We should not have partisan political actors, sometimes unelected bureaucrats, deciding who will be on the ballot based on allegations,” Ashcroft said. “This is the sort of thing you would expect to see in banana republics, not in the United States of America. I’m grateful the Supreme Court put a stop to this idiotic attempt to subvert our election process.” 

In Missouri, the selection of presidential nominations for the November 2024 ballot will be decided by registered voters under the direction of each established state political party. Missouri held its Republican caucuses Saturday. Additional information can be found at www.sos.mo.gov or by contacting local party headquarters.

Editorial -- Group of 50 Begs for War With Iran

While Joe Biden continues to play nuclear chicken with Russia and escalate the conflict there, and Nancy Pelosi grandstands for war with China over Taiwan, a third group of people, 50 congresspeople led by Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), is clamoring for war with Iran.

In 2018, President Donald Trump tore up the Iran Deal, one of the signature achievements of the Obama Administration, and three times brought us to the brink of war. In 2020, Joe Biden ran on a platform of returning to that deal, which he has been dragging his feet on ever since. For anyone who thinks that our belief that the US is sleepwalking into a four front war with Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea is far-fetched, Mr. Gottheimer’s letter is an eye opener. 

His logic is that Iran and paramilitary allies like the Revolutionary Guard are state sponsors of terrorism and thus can’t be trusted. But assuming that he is correct, that makes it all the more important that we have a verifiable agreement in place to ensure that Iran can never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. 

And even if Iran is supportive of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, it is not in Russia’s interest to have a nuclear armed neighbor to its south. Russia started two wars, in Afghanistan in 1979 and in Ukraine this year, based on their belief that nuclear missiles were about to be stationed on their border five minutes from Moscow. If Iran suddenly fell to a coup and a new government was hostile to Moscow, the same thing would happen. There has been plenty of unrest in Iran in recent years, so this scenario is not far fetched.

The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have drained the US treasury of trillions of dollars in reserves that could have been used to build roads and bridges, fund schools, and create energy independence from the likes of Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Given that Iran is three times the population, the cost of prosecuting such a war, even if the US were not already on the brink of war with Russia and China, would be astronomical. How does Mr. Gottheimer and his gang of 50 propose to pay for such a war? He won’t say, let alone what sacrifices we should be expected to make in the event that war breaks out between the US and Iran.

Editorial -- More About Classified Documents

Pam Martens, who publishes a blog that normally focuses on the misdeeds of Wall Street, herself handled classified documents and focused on former President Trump’s stash of top secret documents at Mar-a-Lago on September 1st. The name of her blog is, “Wall Street on Parade.  As part of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, they showed a photo showing numerous top secret documents found during the raid that they submitted to the court. 

Martens wrote about the reaction of people who served in the military and who reacted on Twitter:

“Again, as a Veteran, w/a former top level security clearance, seeing TOP SECRET,SECRET, NOFORN, HCS, SI, documents laying on a closet floor, it is clear to me: Trump needs to be arrested NOW!”

“I had a TS/SCI clearance for 19 years and this photo absolutely sets me off. This is absolutely insane.”

“I had a security clearance when I was active duty. I was always so careful with what I talked about, with ensuring proper storage of documents because I cared about national security, even if my part was tiny. The thought of highest level secret docs being seen by ?? I’m livid!”

There were hundreds of other tweets like this.

She notes that in order to access classified documents, you have to pass multiple background checks. When you handle documents, if one paragraph in any manual is classified, then the whole manual becomes classified. A single typo in certain manuals can be grounds for immediate termination. 

When you first work in government, one of the first things you are told is that protecting national security is everybody’s business. Last week, we talked about some of the worst Presidents in US history. I would add someone else – Lyndon Johnson, who took classified documents related to his successor, Richard Nixon, when he left the White House. He created the precedent for Hillary Clinton to store classified emails on her computer. She, in turn, created the precedent for Donald Trump. 

Both Clinton and Trump are unfit for office. When she ran for the White House in 2016, we were told that she had already been vetted, and that there was no need to worry about things coming out about her. She was catastrophically wrong, and during the campaign, there was one thing after another about her. The same was true for Donald Trump. His taking of classified documents is just par for the course.

Editorial -- No President is Above the Law

Recently, the FBI took the step of raiding the home of former President Donald Trump, looking for classified documents that the former President brought with him when he left office. The object should not be to go after one’s political opponent. The object should be to uphold the law. While people, including Mr. Trump, are presumed innocent until proven guilty, the FBI was within its rights to execute a search warrant on his property, provided that it was properly done, and signed off on by a judge.

This action was not taken against Hillary Clinton, who allegedly illegally deleted 33,000 emails from her private server. This action was not taken against Hunter Biden. If there was probable cause to believe that either Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Biden committed a crime of some kind, then the FBI would be derelict in its duty not to get a search warrant. 

This needs to be the start of a new era, in which no president is above the law. It cannot just be a partisan witch hunt against a former President that Joe Biden does not like. 

And it is really interesting that Senator Josh Hawley, who doubtless helped lead the “lock her up” chants in 2016, is now portraying Mr. Trump as the victim. That’s the whole problem. For partisans like Mr. Hawley, if it is Hillary Clinton who is the subject, she should be locked up because she is a Democrat and he is a Republican. But if the FBI does the same thing to Donald Trump, then he is a victim.

Mr. Hawley actually calls for the Attorney General, Merrick Garland, to be impeached over this warrant and for FBI Director Christopher Wray to be fired. The problem is that impeachment is reserved for high crimes and misdemeanors. For Congress to impeach Mr. Garland, we need a set of high crimes and misdemeanors, and they must be convincing enough to get two thirds of US Senators to go along. They cannot just be based on partisan bickering.

Proposed EPA Rule to Limit Use of Atrazine

Last month, the EPA issued a proposed rule that would limit the use of atrazine. Atrazine is a common herbicide that is used to stop pre and post emergence broadleaf and grassy weeds in crops such as sorghum and corn. It is the second most widely used herbicide after glyphosate. Studies, including a 2007 study from the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, and a 2017 study from Weed Science, estimate that positive effect on corn yields have been anywhere from 1-8%. A 2014 article from Pest Management Science estimates that the positive effects on sorghum yields have been as high as 20%.

The proposed rules involve a level of aquatic level concentration of 3.4 parts per billion, as opposed to the current 15 parts per billion. The Missouri Farm Bureau has protested the new rules, saying these rules would dramatically impact atrazine use for over 70% of corn acres nationwide. They say that the EPA did not convene a Scientific Advisory Panel in making this decision, and that previous panels dismissed such a low level.

In the event of watersheds with concentrations exceeding 3.4 parts per billion, the EPA would recommend a combination of reduced application rates and runoff control measures, which the Farm Bureau says would also affect 90 other herbicide formulations. They say the estimated cost to replace atrazine would be $42 per acre due to replacement costs and yield loss due to decreased pest control

In September 2020, the Trump Administration announced it would be reapproving atrazine for the next 15 years. The Center for Biological Diversity and other public interest groups sued, saying the Trump Administration disregarded safeguards for children’s health, allowed more than 50% more atrazine to end up in US waterways, ignored recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences, and violated the Endangered Species Act. 

In November 2020, as the result of a court settlement, the EPA released an assessment finding that atrazine is likely to harm more than 1,000 of the nation’s endangered plants and animals. 

In November 2021, a followup assessment conducted by the EPA included a 64 page document describing the harmful effects of atrazine on plants, fish, birds, and mammals. The introduction reads in part, “In target pests (e.g., various weed species), atrazine has a mechanism of action of inhibiting photosynthesis in photosystem II (PSII). Triazine herbicides such as propazine bind with a protein complex of the Photosystem II in chloroplast photosynthetic membranes (Schulz et al., 1990). The result is an inhibition in the transfer of electrons through the light reactions of photosynthesis that in turn inhibits the formation and release of oxygen, production of adenosine triphosphate, and the fixation of carbon dioxide into sugars.”

“Atrazine is slightly toxic to birds and mammals and is practically non-toxic to terrestrial invertebrates on an acute exposure basis. In most terrestrial animal species, chronic effects are the predominant concern and are discussed further below. Based on the mechanism of action in target plants, i.e., disruption of photosynthesis, atrazine is toxic to most photoautotroph organisms including unicellular algae and flowering plants.”

“Atrazine is moderately toxic to freshwater and estuarine/marine fish, highly toxic to freshwater aquatic invertebrates and very highly toxic to estuarine/marine aquatic invertebrates on an acute exposure basis. Chronic exposure studies for freshwater and estuarine/marine fish, aquatic phase amphibians and aquatic invertebrates resulted in effects on survival, growth or reproduction.”

The EPA is accepting public comments on the proposed rule until October 7th.

Editorial -- Politicians Playing Off Law Enforcement Agencies Against Each Other

Recently, we have noticed a deeply disturbing pattern of politicians playing off state and federal law enforcement against each other. And that’s just wrong.

In 2021, the Missouri Legislature passed the Second Amendment Preservation Act, which says that federal laws and regulations that infringe on the people’s right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment must be invalid in Missouri. Missouri is within their rights to litigate against certain federal gun laws in court. The Supreme Court is showing a willingness to explore the issue. But states cannot simply pass nullification acts against federal laws that they don’t like. Furthermore, the law prohibits state and local law enforcement from cooperating in the enforcement of such laws. This is the part which is disturbing, because given the rampant rise of crime, cooperation between federal and state law enforcement agencies is essential. This includes getting guns out of the hands of felons, which is still on the books in Missouri and is still being enforced.

The US Constitution’s Supremacy Clause says that federal law is supreme over state law. We litigated this issue in the 1800’s. It was settled by the Civil War. States cannot simply pass nullification acts against laws they don’t like. 

Now, we have the actions of FBI Director Christopher Wray, who is snooping around. He wants to know the personal information of people in Missouri who have concealed carry permits. Under Missouri state law, sheriffs cannot turn this information over to anyone, even the feds. Privacy is a right that is contained in the US Constitution, and the ruling on privacy was left intact by the Supreme Court when it overturned Roe vs. Wade. 

When Senator Josh Hawley asked Director Wray questions about the nature and scope of the audit, Director Wray cut and run from the questions and refused to answer them. We all agree on the need to keep guns out of the hands of people who are a threat to themselves and others. Missouri has a law against felons possessing firearms, and red flag laws have been passed in Republican controlled states. But Director Wray’s actions go far beyond efforts to keep guns out of the hands of people who are a threat to themselves and others. They are a blatant effort to harass law abiding gun owners, and they are a blatant effort to play off federal, state, and local law enforcement against each other.

While he was appointed by Donald Trump, President Joe Biden has the authority to fire the FBI Director. The fact that he has not done so and has failed to direct Mr. Wray to back off tells me he is OK with the FBI snooping on the records of law abiding gun owners. And then Joe Biden wonders why nobody likes him.

Editorial -- Joe Biden’s Failure on COVID

On Wednesday, the Nodaway County Health Department announced 13 new cases of the Coronavirus. As of Wednesday, there were 60 active cases in the county, including three current hospitalizations. This mirrors a national trend. After dropping to as low as 50,000 new cases a day, the number of cases per day has risen to 100,000 a day, plateaued for a while, and has now plateaued at around 130,000 per day.

No reasonable person can argue that Joe Biden’s policies on COVID have been anything but a catastrophic failure. More people have died under Biden than Trump. When he became President on January 20th, 2021, we were supposed to have Dr. Fauci in charge, and a whole of government effort deployed in order to eradicate the virus and get everyone vaccinated. But now, COVID continues to rage on. 

It doesn’t do any good for Joe Biden to blame Donald Trump for the present situation. Sure, Donald Trump failed to protect us from the virus, didn’t help us enough, surrounded himself with grifters and virus deniers, and encouraged science denial. But Joe Biden has had 1½ years now to clean up Donald Trump’s mess.

Now, the Biden Administration is engaging in the same failed policies that Donald Trump engaged in against the monkeypox virus. His CDC failed to expand testing until late June. They tested 2,000 people for the monkeypox from mid-May to the end of June, when an optimal response necessitated testing 15,000 people a week. The Biden Administration had on hand 2,400 doses of Jynneos, a vaccine for monkeypox. The FDA is dragging its feet on approval of a vaccine plant in Denmark that has 780,000 doses.

The Biden Administration is showing the same kind of incompetence in its response to the Monkeypox virus that the Trump Administration showed in its response to the Coronavirus – lack of coordination among federal agencies, the fact that the CDC refuses to recognize a crisis when it’s right under its nose, the fact that it makes excuses when it can’t compile data, and a complete lack of engagement at the top.

We were told that Joe Biden had a wealth of experience in government, and that Trump’s incompetence would be replaced by his competence. That did not happen. And then he wonders why nobody likes him.

Editorial -- Meanwhile, in the GOP Corner…

The problem with the Republicans is that there are too many not willing to own up to former President Trump’s actions following the November 2020 elections and the certification of Joe Biden by the Electoral College.

One is entitled to hold that the elections of 2020 were unfair, mount legal challenges to the elections in key states, and push the notion that serious changes need to be made. 

But what happened on December 18th, 2020 set in motion the events that would lead to January 6th. People like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, and Patrick Byrne talked a junior staffer into letting them into the White House to meet with Trump. They wanted Mr. Trump to order the Defense Department to seize state voting machines and appoint Mrs. Powell as a special counsel to investigate voter fraud, giving her broad powers. 

While Mr. Trump did not try to seize the voting machines, he subsequently tweeted, “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

People on the right or the left have the right to protest. There were massive protests following the election of Mr. Trump in 2016. We don’t know what Mr. Trump’s state of mind or his intent was. But certain supporters interpreted it as a call to violence and a call to disrupt the Congressional certification of Mr. Biden on January 6th.

So, what is one supposed to do if worst comes to worst? Vote for the current President, whose primary purpose is to stick it to the Russians, even at the cost of driving up gas prices and bringing us to the brink of nuclear war, which would get many of us killed? Or vote for the former President, who had too many people surrounding him willing to engage in mob violence, and who led us into a different crisis every day?

For the good of the country, the two main parties need to make a fresh start. The Republicans need to nominate Anybody But Trump, while the Democrats need to nominate Anybody But Biden or Harris. 

Editorial -- The Iran Deal

Reason number 999,999 why nobody likes Joe Biden – he can’t be counted on to keep his word. While Barack Obama was President, he lived up, for once, to his promise to keep us out of wars by striking the Iran Deal, which limits Iran’s ability to make a nuclear weapon, which protects one of our closest allies in the region, Israel, from attack.

But when he took office, Donald Trump broke the deal in 2018. When he ran for office in 2020, Joe Biden promised he would heal the soul of the nation. He promised he would return to the Iran Deal. But once he took power, Joe Biden broke his word. 

This is the problem with Joe Biden in a nutshell. He is happy to promise whatever people want to hear when he comes for your votes, but when it actually comes time to do something, he does what his handlers in the Military Industrial Complex want. And besides, given his desire to “stick it to the Russians,” anything that the Russians support, he is automatically against.

While the present administration does not seem interested in conflict with Iran, there is no guarantee that a future administration won’t start one. Donald Trump, on three occasions, brought us to the brink of conflict with Iran. 

In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin set out on a course of conflict with the West at the Munich Security Conference, and one of his main excuses was the conflict in Iraq. Continuing to refuse to bargain in good faith with the Iranians when it was the US which broke its word will only give President Putin and other dictators like him further excuses to refuse to listen to the US.

Editorial -- No Ideas. No Solutions

John Bolton came out of the woodworks Saturday and said on CBS that Joe Biden was making “mistake after mistake” on Ukraine. He claimed Biden could have prevented the conflict, but didn’t. He says Biden shouldn’t have announced publicly that troops wouldn’t be sent to Ukraine before the conflict, to leave the burden of ambiguity on Russia. He also said that Biden should have stuck it to the Russians sooner, before the conflict began.

The problem is that John Bolton never met a war he didn’t like. When he worked for Donald Trump, the former President said that he was pressuring him to go to war so much that if he had taken his advice, the US would have been in World War VI. 

Mr. Bolton said, “I think now they don’t know what outcome to expect; they don’t know what they want to achieve,” regarding a resolution of the Ukraine conflict. The problem is that Mr. Bolton offers none of his own besides regaining the full territorial integrity of Ukraine, something that is not likely to happen. Neither does President Biden. And then he wonders why polls consistently show him losing to Donald Trump in a rematch of 2020.

The only solution for such conflicts is for the sides to talk. If one round of talks fail, then the only solution is to keep talking. That is how Ronald Reagan was able to strike a deal with the Soviet Union to eliminate intermediate range missiles and lay the groundwork for peace for the next generation. But somehow, the notion that one must talk to one’s enemies is rocket science for people like Mr. Biden or Mr. Bolton, who have a lot more in common than they care to admit.

Editorial: "Stay the Course!"

On Tuesday, May 31st, Joe Biden took to the New York Times opinion pages to defend our country’s escalation of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Most notable is what he didn’t talk about – the continued squeezing of Rural America and the continued rise of gas prices and a lot of other goods. Also on May 31st, gas prices in Worth County went up to $4.29, a new all-time high. 

His defense seems awfully familiar – it is very much like George Bush’s “Stay the Course” mantra in Iraq that not only failed to achieve any meaningful gains, but that laid the groundwork for future terrorist organizations such as ISIS. Joe Biden does not speak for the “free world.” He can speak for himself. 

The President talks about providing Ukraine with rocket systems that he says will allow them to strike key targets on the battlefield. This is what the US and their allies have been saying all along. Even if these efforts are ultimately successful, like they were following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, what is to stop these weapons systems from being used against us? As late as 1993, Osama Bin Laden was portrayed as a freedom fighter by the New York Times.

Meanwhile, what about the millions of people here in the US who are hurting from pain at the pump? Joe Biden did not offer one thing in his NYT piece offering relief. Yes, we realize that the US does not directly control the price of oil markets and the price of gas. But the more that the US ramps up war hysteria against Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, or anyone else that the Very Important People in Washington say we are supposed to hate, oil prices go through the roof, followed by gas prices. 

Our conservative friends would argue that Joe Biden should return to the policies of Donald Trump and engage in more drilling and more fracking, increasing supply and reducing pain at the pump. Our more liberal friends would argue that we should do a whole of government approach to saturate the country with wind, solar, and electric vehicles, freeing us from dependence on Russian oil. However, Joe Biden is doing none of the above. His plan is to stick it to the Russians, expect us to pay the price, and then blame it on the Russians when inflation and gas prices keep going through the roof.

The President’s reassurances in his op-ed are all hollow. He reassures us that Ukraine has promised us that they will not hit Russian territory with the new batch of weapons he is sending them. But Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, ran on a platform of peace with Russia and on stopping the civil war in Ukraine. Instead, he has done nothing but escalate. And what is to prevent a future President from telling Ukraine they can?

The President reassures us that he does not seek a war between Russia and NATO. But what is to prevent a future president from doing so? Mitt Romney, who is a potential candidate for 2024, has been spoiling for a fight with Russia ever since 2012. 

Biden writes, “Unprovoked aggression, the bombing of maternity hospitals and centers of culture, and the forced displacement of millions of people make the war in Ukraine a profound moral issue.” True. But two wrongs do not make a right. Joe Biden’s escalatory policies risk turning our hostile relations into a shooting war, or even a nuclear war, which could get us all killed. 

And if might does not make right, as the President rightly says, then when can we expect Joe Biden to admit that he was wrong to support our war of choice in Iraq, the biggest foreign policy disaster in US history? This is not a matter of “apologizing” for the US. Admitting that one was wrong is a moral virtue in any competent philosophical or religious system.

Defense Bill Gives Troops Pay Raise, Aids Rosecrans

The US House Friday passed a bipartisan defense bill that went beyond President Donald Trump’s requested increase. It passed by a vote of 344-81. It must now pass the Senate, which is working on its own version of the defense bill. The two bills must be reconciled and then sent to the President for his signature or veto. The total price tag is $696 billion, which is also beyond sequestration limits that were set in 2011.

Congressman Sam Graves, who voted for the bill, noted in a news release that the bill contains the biggest pay raise for soldiers in eight years, with a 2.4% increase. The bill would also allow the Pentagon to recruit new personnel and modernize the Air National Guard’s C-130H fleet. Rosecrans Airport, in St. Joseph, houses many of the nation’s C-130H planes.

In a separate release Friday, Senator Roy Blunt said that the Senate version, which passed unanimously out of committee, said that one priority was $10 million to Rosecrans to construct a communications facility there.

Increasing military spending had been one of President Trump’s main campaign promises on the trail last year. One of his favorite lines was, “We’re going to build a military so big, nobody’s going to mess with us.”

Donald Trump on Rural America and Agriculture

The following is part of Donald Trump's plan on the economy. The website Agri-Pulse published more on Trump's plans for rural America and agriculture here.

2. Regulatory reform—

• A temporary pause on new regulations and a review of previous regulations to see which need to be scrapped.
• Require each federal agency to prepare a list of all of the regulations they impose on American business, and rank them from most critical to health and safety to least critical. Least critical regulations will receive priority consideration for repeal.
• Remove bureaucrats who only know how to kill jobs; replace them with experts who know how to create jobs.
• Targeted review for regulations that inhibit hiring. These include:
• The Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which forces investment in renewable energy at the expense of coal and natural gas, raising electricity rates;
• The EPA’s Waters of the United States rule, which gives the EPA the ability to regulate the smallest streams on private land, limiting land use; and
• The Department of Interior’s moratorium on coal mining permits, which put tens of thousands of coal miners out of work.
• Excessive regulation is costing our country as much as 2 trillion dollars a year, and we will end it.

Regulations may have cost us 600,000 small businesses since the start of the recent recession—largely because of new regulations on financing—and some 6 million fewer jobs. The Heritage Foundation has found that the Obama administration has imposed 229 major regulations (those with a cost of $100 million or more) at a cost of $108 billion annually.

3. Trade reform—

• Appoint trade negotiators whose goal will be to win for America: narrowing our trade deficit, increasing domestic production, and getting a fair deal for our workers.
• Renegotiate NAFTA.
• Withdraw from the TPP.
• Bring trade relief cases to the world trade organization.
• Label China a currency manipulator.
• Apply tariffs and duties to countries that cheat.
• Direct the Commerce Department to use all legal tools to respond to trade violations.

Our trade deficit in goods is almost $800 billion on an annual basis. The trade deficit subtracts from growth and costs the US jobs. This has hurt working Americans because good-paying manufacturing jobs are hard to find. Less than half of the population 25 and older without a high school diploma is in the workforce; the unemployment rate of those who are in the almost 30 percent higher than the overall unemployment rate. This leads to poverty and an increase in demands on the nation’s social service network. Better trade policies can reverse this outcome dramatically.

Hillary Clinton has supported every major trade deal responsible for job losses in the United States, and will enact the TPP if given the chance.

TPP will hammer the car industry because it does not resolve, among other things, the substantial non-tariff barriers to U.S. cars being sold in Japan and other countries — including currency manipulation, excess supply and closed dealerships. According to the Peterson Institute, TPP would increase the automobile trading deficit by $23 billion by 2025.

Donald Trump Set to Give Speech at Site of Civil War Battle -- That Didn't Happen

Red State is fast jumping on the #NeverHillaryNeverTrump bandwagon. Today, they reported that Donald Trump will give a speech at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling (VA). It is being billed as a major policy speech against Hillary Clinton. The golf course contains a monument to a civil war battle and labels that are of the Potomac River, “The River of Blood.” Told that civil war historians were saying that there was no battle there, Trump was quoted on Twitter by National Review’s Liam Donovan as saying, “How would they know? They were not there.”

Trump shows off his “expertise” as a “historian:”

“That was a prime site for river crossings,” Mr. Trump said. “So, if people are crossing the river, and you happen to be in a civil war, I would say that people were shot — a lot of them.”

The club does indeed lie a stone’s throw from Rowser’s Ford, where, as an official historical marker notes, Gen. J. E. B. Stuart led 5,000 Confederate troops including cavalry across the Potomac en route to the Battle of Gettysburg.

But no one died in that crossing, historians said, or in any other notable Civil War engagement on the spot.

There really was such a place called the River of Blood. Except that it happens to be Georgia and it was known as the Battle of Chickamauga.

Early on the morning of September_19, 1863 Col. Daniel McCook was ordered to give William S, Rosecrans army a little more protection as it moved north towardsChattanooga, Tennessee by destroying Reed's Bridge over Chickamauga Creek. As McCook advanced he brushed up against the extreme rear of Confederate General Bushrod Johnson's division.

Shortly after midnight McCook set the bridge on fire and reported a brigade of Rebels in the area to George Henry Thomas. What McCook thought was a brigade of Rebels was actually the extreme rear of Longstreet's Corps. General John Croxton was sent forward to flush out McCook's "Rebel brigade" and at 9:00am wired Thomas from Jay's Mill, "Which of the 4 or 5 Rebel brigades do you want me to flush out?" The battle of Chickamauga had begun.

Senior Union officers thought that the Confederates were still east of Chickamauga Creek and were shocked when they finally realized the majority of the Confederates under Braxton Bragg were already across the creek.

Neither side had planned for this battle, yet it was one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. But Donald Trump is a showman, not a historian, and for him, the show must go on.

Trump Tried to Raise Money from Qaddafi

Donald Trump has a proven track record of being a serial flip-flopper. First, he tried to do business with Libyan dictator Qaddafi in 2009. Then, he went along with NATO’s war to take him out. Now that he is running against Hillary Clinton, he says the whole thing was a catastrophic mistake. Expect him to try to break out the Benghazi issue on Hillary like he tried to make an issue out of Obama’s citizenship and religion in 2012.

This Sunday, when asked about the U.S.’s Libya policy on CBS News’ Face the Nation, Trump brought up an incident many had forgotten: that time in 2009 when Qaddafi rented Trump’s opulent Westchester estate to erect a huge traditional tent where the Libyan leader would stay — and sacrifice a live lamb — while in New York for a United Nations assembly.

The despised tyrant had been turned down by many other venues.
The dictator, who was overthrown and killed while resisting a bloody revolution by the Libyan people in 2011, never slept at the estate. After a storm of publicity stoked outrage, the town of Bedford yanked permission for the tent, scuttling the Libyans’ plans and forcing their leader to stay in Manhattan, indoors. Qaddafi, Trump said on Face the Nation, “paid me a fortune, never got to stay there. And it became sort of a big joke.”

This is part of Trump’s proven track record of courting foreign dictators like Putin and sucking up to the likes of Saddam. There was a reason for that as Buzzfeed notes.Donald Trump had trouble getting credit from normal channels. I guess after four different bankruptcies, one develops a reputation for being difficult to deal with and a person who would game the system. This explains why Mr. Trump wanted access to Col. Qaddafi.

Trump’s uneven access to loans from mainstream banks may have motivated his quest for overseas investments. Trump has no lending relationships with the biggest U.S. banks, including Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, according to his financial disclosures. Instead, he often leans on smaller firms such as Ladder Capital that have less money on hand, the New York Times reported.

So, there is an explanation for Trump’s cozying up with Putin — he wants to get his hands on Putin’s money and oil, and he wants to get some good deals for exporting oil and natural gas from what he thinks will be a powerhouse economy. It’s too bad that demand for fossil fuels is plummeting thanks to the reality of climate change and other countries turning to cleaner forms of energy. The question is, when Trump loses by a landslide to Hillary Clinton, where is he going to turn to get credit since more and more people refuse to do business with him due to his racist and inflammatory remarks?

Trump Doubles Down, Attacks Muslim Judges

Donald Trump has not only attacked Mexican judges, he doubled down on Face the Nation yesterday and attacked Muslim judges as well. His reasoning — they can’t be fair to him since he has called for barring all Muslims from this country.

Asked if he believed that he would be treated unfairly by a Muslim judge because of his call to ban all Muslims from entering the United States, Trump said, “It’s possible.”
“It’s possible, yes,” he said. “That would be possible, absolutely.”

Donald Trump is against everything that this Constitution stands for. If you exercise your right to free speech, Donald Trump will threaten to sue; he has 2,500 active lawsuits in progress and has called for weakening liability laws for newspapers. If you’re a Mexican or Muslim, Donald Trump believes that the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply. Donald Trump opposes the Declaration of Independence as well since he believes that not all people are created equal. And he opposes the 4th Amendment given his calls to bomb the families of people he believes to be terrorists.

During the McCarthy years, he engaged in crackpot conspiracy theories alleging that the government was crawling with communists waiting for just the right signal from Moscow to spring into action. It was widely believed at first. But when his allegations got more and more wild and hysterical, more and more people wondered if they would be next. This is the case with Donald Trump. It is not a matter of if, but when he will implode.

We have to remember that Donald Trump is the real enemy — nobody else. All of the establishment Republicans — Ryan, McConnell, and Preibus — are now on record as supporting fascism. They don’t care who is in charge as long as he supports their radical Koch Brothers backed right wing austerity agenda. It is ironic that the Party of Lincoln is now fomenting the very passions and sentiments that created the Civil War in the first place.

Zombie Trump Channels "The Sting," Seeks to Bring Back Keystone XL

Cody Cain writes about the movie “The Sting” in Salon.

As the movie shows, at the heart of a con lies a deception. In the movie, the victim of the con, the “mark,” was a mob boss, and Newman and Redford assured the mark they had a secret connection in horse races, which gave them a sure way to pick the winners. They told the mark that if he bet on their tips, he was certain to win.

So the mark attends Newman’s betting parlor to test it out for himself, first on a small scale, and if it worked, he would make a bet to strike it big. The mark places his bet at the betting parlor following the tip, and sits down at a table to await the race. The betting parlor is quite nice with big-boards on the walls displaying the status of various races and loud speaker broadcasting live coverage.

The bell rings and the horses are off. The announcer relays the action as the horses gallop around the track. This one is in the lead, now that one overtakes. And here they come approaching the finish line, it’s going to be close, they’re neck-and-neck, and, the winner is… the horse that was predicted in the tip! It worked.

Except that it turns out that everything is fake. And Trump’s energy policy, in which he promises us unheard of prosperity if we would only embrace his notion of ditching climate change, is fake. Suppose he is right when he said in his energy speech in North Dakota recently that we have 1.5 times as much potential reserves as Saudi Arabia. Suppose we could leverage that into prosperity. It would be like a devil’s bargain — prosperity now for pain later. More likely, it would not even get off the ground as demand for fossil fuels like coal and oil plummet.

This is because manmade climate change is real and the fact that oceans are rising is real. If we do not act and we operate in the cavalier manner that Donald Trumpsuggests, our coastal cities and the whole state of Florida will be inundated. Water farther inland would be undrinkable because it would have salt in it. If you are concerned about foreign refugees flooding into this country, the refugee crisis that this would entail would dwarf either the Mexican immigrants or the refugee crisis taking place in Europe. Anyone who has read Grapes of Wrath will know what I am talking about. If we do not act, not only will extreme weather events happen more often, there will be dozens, hundreds, or thousands of refugees from right here inside this country coming to a town near you.

Ken Ilgunas, writing in Salon, says:

It’s difficult to determine what Trump actually believes and what he’s saying merely to pander to his audience of the day. (This time, it was to an audience of oil executives at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in North Dakota, where he wanted to pick up unpledged delegates to secure the nomination, which he did.) The sincerity of Trump’s climate denial is brought into question by the fact that he is applying for permission to build a seawall in Ireland to protect one of his golf courses from rising sea levels.

But as confused as Trump may be over climate change, he more than most politicians understands the usefulness of symbols in an election campaign, whether it’s his Reagan-era “Make America Great Again” slogan or his Mexican-American wall. Trump’s call to build the pipeline is a symbol to fossil fuel interests and free market ideologues that he won’t be a pushover to environmentalists.

I have heard certain Bernie or Bust types suggest that he doesn’t mean what he says most of the time. But given what he has said, we cannot afford the risk of electing him and realizing that he meant what he said. Keystone XL would not only be a threat to the environment, it would be a massive threat to property rights; it was being tied up in massive litigation in Nebraska by the time President Obama pulled it. Donald Trump, in a GOP debate earlier this year, said that he was for eminent domain, meaning that a Trump administration would seize millions of acres of property if that’s what it took to “make America great again.”

We have a moral obligation to make the planet better for our children and our grandchildren, not get as much as we can in the mistaken belief that the world is about to end anyway. Neither Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton would match Franklin Roosevelt’s commitment to the environment, but they are both light years better than Trump. Roosevelt created millions of new jobs through the Civilian Conservation Corps; they did numerous projects to protect the environment:

The workers of the CCC were paid to do tasks such as planting millions of trees, protecting forests from wildfires, opening summer camps, improving national and state parks, and combating soil erosion.

I submit that we must go father than what Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton offer. Everyone who wants work should have work, and we should have a work-based economy where everyone is paid a living wage. Courts could order defendants to get employment to pay fines and restitution and child support. People who have student debt could work to pay off their student loans. The government could pay for one year of college for every year you served.

Here is Bernie Sanders’ plan:

Bernie’s comprehensive plan to combat climate change and make sure our planet is habitable and safe for our kids and grandkids will:

Cut U.S. carbon pollution by 40 percent by 2030 and by over 80 percent by 2050 by putting a tax on carbon pollution, repealing fossil fuel subsidies and making massive investments in energy efficiency and clean, sustainable energy such as wind and solar power.

Create a Clean-Energy Workforce of 10 million good-paying jobs by creating a 100% clean energy system. Transitioning toward a completely nuclear-free clean energy system for electricity, heating, and transportation is not only possible and affordable it will create millions of good jobs, clean up our air and water, and decrease our dependence on foreign oil.

Return billions of dollars to consumers impacted by the transformation of our energy system and protect the most vulnerable communities in the country suffering the ravages of climate change. Bernie will tax polluters causing the climate crisis, and return billions of dollars to working families to ensure the fossil fuel companies don’t subject us to unfair rate hikes. Bernie knows that climate change will not affect everyone equally – disenfranchised minority communities and the working poor will be hardest hit. The carbon tax will also protect those most impacted by the transformation of our energy system and protect the most vulnerable communities in the country suffering the ravages of climate change.

Most significantly, he would do a better job of transitioning people working in carbon-based industries to green energy such as wind and solar. The people working in coal mines are not fooled; they realize that theirs is a dying industry. The people of West Virginia voted for Bernie Sanders because he offered a strong plan for transitioning people. Now, I am not sure how well working in a coal mine would translate into working in solar or wind, but the fact that he would create 10 million new jobs means that there would be a lot of people impacted from everywhere in the county.

Furthermore, Bernie Sanders ties in climate change to Citizens United. He rightly says that too many politicians are too beholden to big money interests like big oil and big coal and big fracking. He has shown that running a campaign based on small donations can still be competitive.

Hillary Clinton takes a different approach to fighting climate change, but one that is also very ambitious.

Create good-paying jobs by making the United States the clean energy superpower of the 21st century.

Set national goals to have 500 million solar panels installed; generate enough renewable energy to power every home in America; cut energy waste in homes, schools, and hospitals by a third; and reduce American oil consumption by a third.

Lead the world in the fight against climate change by bringing greenhouse gas emissions to 30 percent below what they were in 2005 within the next decade—and keep going.

And one of her initiatives could directly benefit the local economy.

Launch a $60 billion Clean Energy Challenge to partner with states, cities, and rural communities and give them the tools and resources they need to go beyond federal standards in cutting carbon pollution and expanding clean energy. The Clean Energy Challenge will also help ensure all Americans share in the benefits of a clean energy economy by encouraging solar and energy efficiency investments in low-income communities.

All the communities where I live are low-income communities (meaning they qualify for Community Development Block Grants), meaning that they would qualify for this program and could get a lot of money. There is local interest by certain landowners in hosting wind farms; towns or our country or a wind company could pay the landowners to host the windmills, and then turn around and sell the electricity to utilities, which are seeking to comply with requirements to produce cleaner and cleaner energy. I don’t know all the details of this program yet, but it would be something to look into. If that’s what we have to do to revive the area economy and keep people on the farm, that’s what we have to do.

Neither plan is perfect because I feel we can’t do enough to get people who want work employment, but both plans are light years better than anything Donald Trump offers. His energy plans would not benefit our local economy to our knowledge, but they could bring economic refugees from other parts of the country in a few decades’ time.

Donald Trump Carrying Out Vendetta Against Obama Over Trump University

Julianne Hing of The Nation writes that Donald Trump’s racist tirades against Judge Curiel deflect from the larger issue of for-profit colleges and universities.

It was a classic Trump move: create bogeymen out of thin air in order to prop up his self-imagined victimhood; home in on a person’s race or sex as the basis for his attacks; and then antagonize as a form of diversion from the matter at hand. That matter would be Trump University, the mogul’s real-estate courses that purportedly taught customers how to become like Trump, for as much as $35,000, or starting at the low, low price of $1,495. The lawsuit alleges that far from teaching students actual real-estate expertise, Trump ran a fraudulent business scheme.

Throughout the 2000’s, there were all these TV commercials from private universities saying how easy it would be to get your degree. One in particular showed this young lady at a job interview trying to convince the interviewer that she should have the job because she’s got a brilliant personality. Naturally, Donald Trump wanted to get in on the action.

Take, for instance, the 2010 Senate testimony of Joshua Pruyn, a former admissions representative for Westwood College, a for-profit chain of, at the time, 17 campuses. Pruyn was technically an admissions advisor, but in reality his position was that of a glorified sales rep. “During the interview, we were taught to portray ourselves as advisors looking out for the students’ best interests and ensuring they were a good fit for the school. This fake interview would allow the representative to ask students questions to uncover a student’s motivators and pain points—their hopes, fears, and insecurities—all of which would later be used to pressure a student to enroll,” Pruyn testified.
The for-profit schools industry targeted people of color, poor people, and veterans because they more likely to be eligible for public financial aid like Pell Grants. This much-parodied Everest College commercial should be very familiar with anyone who watches daytime television.

Donald Trump, of course, used these tactics to get people to sign up. No money? No problem; all you had to do was max out your credit card. The instructors were handpicked by Donald Trump (false) and you would get in on all his secrets about selling real estate. The catch was that if you had a lot of questions you couldn’t figure out, you had to sign up for even more expensive courses.

One episode on The Apprentice showed the low opinion Donald Trump has about higher education. He ordered his two teams to teach a class — that was the only instruction or guidance they had. I’ve always maintained that either you connect with a student or you don’t. But having gotten a teaching degree, I can say for a fact that you can’t always go into a teaching setting and expect to be good at it. Neither group scored particularly well; one group picked a good topic but botched up the lesson; the other picked a bland topic but presented it really well. You have to know the law, you have to know how to manage your students, you have to know how to prepare and assess, you have to know how to maintain discipline. And even with 4-6 years of preparation, your preparation does not cover every possible situation that can occur.

I submit that Donald Trump flirted with the White House in 2012 and is running now in part because he has a personal vendetta against Obama over this issue. After 2010-11, the President began cracking down hard on these private universities, the year after he got in on the action. Some private universities are good, but others are just in the business of taking your money. I submit that if they are not willing to do the hard work of proving that they offer value to the student in return for their money, they should not be in business.

Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, while their plans are not perfect, offer improvements on the present situation. Both are far superior to Donald Trump and his plan to fleece people out of their money through more outfits like Trump “University.” Hillary Clinton’s plan:

Students should never have to borrow to pay for tuition, books, and fees to attend a four-year public college in their state under the New College Compact. Pell Grants are not included in the calculation of no-debt-tuition, so Pell recipients will be able to use their grants fully for living expenses. Students at community college will receive free tuition.

Students will do their part by contributing their earnings from working 10 hours a week.

Families will do their part by making an affordable and realistic family contribution.

The federal government will make a major investment in the New College Compact by providing grants to states that commit to these goals, and by cutting interest rates on loans.

States will have to step up and meet their obligation to invest in higher education by maintaining current levels of higher education funding and reinvesting over time.

Colleges and universities will be accountable for improving outcomes and controlling costs to ensure that tuition is affordable and that students who invest in college leave with a degree.

We will encourage innovators who design imaginative new ways of providing a valuable college education to students—while cracking down on abusive practices that burden students with debt without value.

A $25 billion fund will support HBCUs, HSIs, and other MSIs serving a high percentage of Pell Grant recipients to help lower the cost of attendance and improve student outcomes at low-cost, modest-endowment nonprofit private schools.

Hillary’s plan is not perfect because it expects states to contribute. This could lead to another situation down the road where states could refuse to pay their fair share, and the courts agree with them similar to what happened to Obamacare. Also, Hillary’s plan to have students work 10 hours a week could create a lot more competition for jobs, meaning that many would be left out — and still be saddled with debt when they leave college. A lot depends on the college and class, but some courses are particularly rigorous or the concepts are completely foreign, making it challenging for certain students to balance work and classroom instruction.

While Hillary’s plan would cover community college and room and board, Bernie’s plan would cover tuition.

Bernie introduced the College for All Act, which would “eliminate the $70 billion dollar tuition costs at all 4-year public colleges and universities.” To qualify, states would have to foot 33 percent of the bill (the federal government would sponsor the rest) and take various steps to maintain or increase expenditure on improving opportunities for students and faculty.

He would also pay for it with a Robin Hood Tax on financial speculation. Like Hillary’s plan, Bernie’s plan would risk Republican governors and legislatures opting out for political reasons like they are with Obamacare, leaving millions in the lurch. In other words, both plans would make headway, but would not completely address the problem of student debt.

On the other hand, both plans would be light years better than what Donald Trump would offer. He would abolish the Department of Education completely.

Trump didn’t go into detail of what he meant by local education or how to educate the children from South Carolina and New York, but he’s fairly certain that he would rid the country of the Department of Education.
For what it’s worth, the Department of Education might be marred down in bureaucracy like other government departments, but it still has significance. From early education to student loan reform to watching over for-profit schools and how well students are treated, the Dept. of Ed certainly has its place. It’s how low-income students receive Pell grants and how we keep track of school performance. Some federal oversight is needed when it comes to a benchmarked way of monitoring education in America.
Trump also failed to mention, or wasn’t given an opportunity, how he would regulate or monitor education in this country. Likely believing that principles of the free market will work for education, his ideas surrounding education are far too lightweight at the moment to believe that a Trump presidency would be good for students in America.

So, Donald Trump would not regulate it at all. Let the free markets decide. That would allow Donald Trump to restart Trump University and let it run rampant since there would no longer be a US Department of Education to regulate them. If George Bush fleeced the treasury of trillions to pursue his personal vendetta against Saddam,Donald Trump would not only fleece the treasury, he would fleece all of us through Trump University and other such outfits.

A Trump Victory Over Clinton Would Not Be a Repudiation of Progressive Values

The first numbers from Real Clear Politics are out on the Trump/Clinton race. While they show Hillary Clinton leading Trump, it is not a sure thing. Currently, Ms. Clinton has 224 electoral votes in the bag, while Mr. Trump has 143. That means that there are 168 electoral votes that are up for grabs. 

Hillary Clinton has made her bed with the corporate big shots such as Goldman Sachs and others, who donated millions to her campaign and who paid her $225,000 per speech. To her credit, she takes more from small donors (Open Secrets) than the average person, but her actions show she is trying to have it both ways. As Cenk Uygur notes, if she had told Goldman Sachs stuff they did not like to hear, they would not have invited her back over and over again. And the word would not have gotten out among the 1% circles that she was someone they could do business with.

While a Hillary victory over Donald Trump is likely, it is not a given. And her attempts to court Bush donors are not going to help her in that effort. In order for her to win, she has to earn our votes. While I will vote for her, other people might not. She has to do more than triangulate and equivocate. Her recent stance on the Public Option is a good example. It sounds good on the surface, until you realize that all it does is allow people who are 50 or 55 to buy into Medicare. That is a good next step, since there are a lot of insurers who jack up rates for them because they are an insurance risk. However, that alone will not solve the problem of millions who are still uninsured. I had a lady on Twitter whose reaction to Hillary’s plan reminded me of the girl in the country song who sang, “That don't impress me much!”

Most of the Democrats who lost in 2010 and 2014 were not Progressives, but corporate Democrats. There were a few exceptions such as Feingold and Udall, but most of them lost because of the continuing demographic shifts of voters shifting from Southern Democrats to Republicans. Therefore, a loss of Hillary in the upcoming election would not be a repudiation of Progressive values, but a repudiation of Democrats trying to have it both ways by trying to court both the working class and Wall Street.

Another case in point is West Virginia. Paul Farrell, a West Virginia attorney, sought to run for President on the presumption that West Virginia voters, many of whom had families who worked for coal for 180-300 years, would repudiate both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. He touted pro-coal, pro-gun credentials. However, West Virginia voted for Bernie, suggesting that Democrats in Coal Country are just as tired of corporate Democrats as the rest of the country. Farrell got around 7% of the vote even though people knew him, and I wonder how many of those confused him with the TV actor Will Ferrell, who has portrayed Presidents on late night TV before. It took me several tries on Google before I could pull up the West Virginia attorney.

One West Virginia exit poll showed that nearly half of Sanders voters would support Trump over Clinton. While the transition from coal to other forms of energy are inevitable with the signing of the Paris Accord, Hillary does not offer any kind of plan to transition coal workers from energy to other fields beyond vaguely mentioning clean energy. As a peon, I do not know how well skills learned in a coal mine translate to, say, solar and wind energy. Bernie did a better job of relating to these people; his trillion dollar infrastructure plan would create millions of jobs, his opposition to TPP would protect many more, and his $15 minimum wage means that companies would have to hire to meet demand, since people would have more disposable income. The November election is Hillary’s to win. But to do so, she has to relate to us, and she has to relate to workers who stand to lose jobs in the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.