Russian, Racist, Recession - The New Fake News R Words

[HARDCORE]

Russia, racist, recession: The new fake news R words

By Rick Manning

Magically and mystically, this minute the favorite “R” word of the Democrats has shifted from Russia to racist to recession in the blink of an eye — all falsehoods — as they desperately hope that the normal economic cycle turns prior to the Nov. 2020 presidential election.

While the media and indeed Americans for Limited Government’s own articles have spoken a lot about bond inversions, demographics and even overseas influencers on our economy, it is important that you know some facts that will make you feel better about the economic future.

Consumer spending continues to increase at a brisk pace with the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Affairs reporting:

“The increase in personal income in June primarily reflected increases in wages and salaries, government social benefits to persons, and supplements to wages and salaries (table 3).

“The $21.4 billion increase in real PCE (personal consumption expenditures after inflation) in June primarily reflected a $19.5 billion increase in spending for nondurable goods and a $4.6 billion increase in spending for services, that was partially offset by a decline of $1.5 billion in spending for durable goods (table 7). Within nondurable goods, other nondurable goods (including pharmaceutical products) was the leading contributor to the increase. Within durable goods, motor vehicles and parts was the leading contributor to the decline. Detailed information on monthly real PCE spending can be found in Table 2.3.6U.

“Personal outlays increased $44.2 billion in June... Personal saving was $1.34 trillion in June and the personal saving rate, personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income, was 8.1 percent…”

The job market continues to astound observers, remaining extremely strong with more people employed, making more money than ever before. What’s more wages grew at 2.7 percent in the latest reading in the second quarter according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That has benefits for those who make the least in an economic tide that is lifting all boats.

While the unemployment rate remains near record lows, inflation remains under control with prices only increasing by 1.8 percent over the past year according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This below Federal Reserve target inflation rate is significant as it is reported at a time when many high profile (meaning they get on television) economists are worrying that the tariffs imposed upon China would show up as price increases to the consumer. They aren’t. In fact, the Producer Price Index for goods separate from energy for the past month was a paltry 0.1 percent. Even in a rising wage environment, the upward pressure on the cost of goods and services remains negligible.

And of course, interest rates are going down. This has the effect of both lowering the cost of borrowing, but also opening the door for homeowners to save hundreds of dollars on their mortgages by refinancing their homes, potentially pumping billions of dollars into the economy. It also has the effect of lowering the cost of borrowing for businesses looking to expand or purchase new machinery.

In July, 283,000 more Americans had jobs than in June reaching an all-time record for the number of people employed at 157,288,000 people, and after a short period where manufacturing job growth had stalled, July showed new vigor in hiring for those good wage manufacturing jobs.

But the most important indicator that the economy is healthy is the “help wanted” sign on the front door of businesses and incredibly, there continues to be more than 1 million help wanted signs hanging than there are Americans looking for work.

While some publications are reporting that more than third of economists expect a recession in the next year and a half, this means that about two-thirds of economists don’t expect a recession before the election. Any prognostication beyond 2020 is effectively meaningless. The “recession is coming, the recession is coming” narrative is likely to end up being nothing more than the Russia collusion lie that preceded it: Fake news.

Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.

[Boats]

Earlier report on: Trump's three R's for re-election: Racism, Russia and Republican servility
By: Amanda Marcotte - Salon News 7-29-19
RE: https://www.salon.com/2019/07/29/tru...can-servility/

Back in the good old days of, say, 2016, the line about the Republican method for turning out the right-wing vote was that they focused on the "Three G's": God, guns and gays. For decades, demagoguing about the evils of gay rights and the glories of guns, as well as showy acts of piety, have been the bread and butter of Republican politics, the go-to method of whipping up an evangelical base and pushing faltering GOP candidates over the finish line.

But as this past weekend's events show, Donald Trump's strategy for winning the 2020 election would be better understood as the Three Rs: Racism, Russia and Republican servility. By relying on these, Trump hopes he can do exactly what he did in 2016: Run up margins just high enough in Midwestern swing states to win the Electoral College, even though he's likely to lose in the popular vote. Unfortunately, he may not be wrong to believe it will work.

Earlier this month, Trump went on an overtly racist rampage against four congresswomen of color. Most of the media believed that backfired politically on the president. But Trump, egged on by Fox News, seems to have concluded the opposite: He thinks white nationalism is working for him and that he needs to double down.

Over the weekend, Trump, prompted yet again by Fox News, unleashed a racist rant against Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., by claiming that Baltimore, much of which is in Cummings' district, is "a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess" and that "no human being would want to live there," rhetoric clearly intended to dehumanize the residents of that majority-black city.

The barrage continued into Monday morning, as Trump tweeted that the Rev. Al Sharpton, who went to Baltimore to defend the city's honor, "hates whites," making clearer than ever before that there's a white nationalist agenda behind the racist rhetoric.

As Heather Digby Parton has argued at Salon, this isn't just an eruption of racist rage from Fox News Grandpa. Trump's team is leaning into this as a deliberate electoral strategy, to "make this the most divisive election they possibly can," in hopes of inspiring the base and demoralizing the opposition.

On its own, as Parton lays out, that probably won't work. But that's where the Russians come in. As former special counsel Robert Mueller once again made clear for the American public last week, Trump relied heavily in 2016 on the Russian criminal conspiracy to interfere with the election. It's clear that both he and the Russians fully intend to do the same thing in 2020 — conceivably on an even larger scale.

Trump took a major step over the weekend to assist the Russian election interference in 2020 by getting rid of Dan Coats as head of national intelligence. When Trump has lied and denied the Russian conspiracy in the past, Coats has spoken out, affirming that the Russian government's assaults on the U.S. election were quite real. The fear is obviously that Coats might take measures to prevent Russian interference in the future; getting rid of him must be understood as a form of continuing collusion with the Russian conspiracy.

That's doubly so because Trump's replacement for Coats, Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, spent the Mueller hearing leveling asinine attacks on Mueller's work. Ratcliffe also spent his time in Congress floating ridiculous conspiracy theories painting Hillary Clinton as the "real" colluder with Russia.


Considering how intent Trump is on pushing the "no collusion" lie, it's a little surprising that he would so openly collude with Russia's future efforts to interfere with the American election. But the likely reason is that Russian interference, despite Republican efforts to deny it, actually worked to help push Trump over the finish line in a few key districts in swing states in 2016.

The Russian conspiracy primarily worked by using WikiLeaks document dumps to sow anti-Clinton conspiracy theories among potential Democratic voters, driving down her overall vote total. But as questioning by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., during the Mueller hearing illustrated, it's probably no coincidence that Trump's campaign chief, Paul Manafort, shared internal polling with a likely Russian spy: After that happened, Russian spooks blitzed Facebook with micro-targeted ads. That could be a coincidence, but as Lofgren noted, it's more likely the Russians simply worked off voter information they "had been given by ... Mr. Manafort."

Trump doesn't have Manafort anymore. But he does have something better: A loyalist at the head of his intelligence services, ready and eager to squash any effort to keep Russia from committing crimes to manipulate the 2020 election.

Ratcliffe's involvement illustrates perhaps the most important piece of Trump's re-election strategy, which is that he's been aided every step of the way by Republican politicians, the vast majority of whom are Trump supplicants eager to betray this country in order to shore up their own power.

Republican politicians have enabled Trump's blatant racism by running interference for him, using the power of their positions to imply that there's room for legitimate debate over whether Trump is actually a racist. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. R-Ky., for instance, recently said that Trump "is not a racist" and made the nonsensical claim that Trump is telling people of color to leave the country as a strike against "socialism."

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., in his desperation to defend Trump's racism, tweeted out a fake video purporting to show that Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., a frequent target of Trump's racist bile, hates white people. The accusation was false, but Rubio is such a lickspittle he dug in and defended himself anyway.

Republicans are running similar interference when it comes to Trump's overt public collusion with Russia. During the Mueller hearings last week, Republicans on both the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees ignored or rejected Mueller's key findings, which include the fact that the Russian government ordered multiple criminal acts in an effort to interfere with the American election, ample evidence that Trump was aware of this criminal conspiracy and welcomed it, and detailed accounts of how Trump went to great lengths to cover up this conspiracy after the election.

Instead, Republicans have spun a bunch of wild conspiracy theories of their own, even trying to imply that Clinton was the real Russian colluder. None of it really makes any sense, but it isn't meant to. It's just a firehose of noise and distortion, meant to confuse both people watching and reporters covering the proceedings. The ultimate purpose is to create space for Trump to collude with Russia in plain sight, shielded from accountability by a blanket of Republicans who constantly claim that Americans must not believe their own lying eyes.

To be sure, the Three G's aren't entirely gone from Republican politics. The evangelical vote needs whipping up and Trump is providing plenty of that when it comes to attacking LGBTQ rights, protecting the gun lobby and undermining women's rights, which is all "God" was ever really a euphemism for. Vice President Mike Pence is still heavily promoting those lines of attack, and Trump can periodically be counted on to offer insincere claims of piety and half-baked defenses of "Second Amendment rights" to help those efforts along.

But when it comes to 2020, it's clear that the meat of Trump's campaign will be racism, the Russians and his Republican lackeys. It's not at all clear that this will fail. All Trump needs is to whip up racist hysteria in certain parts of the country while dividing and demoralizing the Democratic vote. He's got Russian propagandists and Republican apologists helping him every step of the way.


About this writer: AMANDA MARCOTTE
Amanda Marcotte is a politics writer for Salon. Her new book, "Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself," is out now. She's on Twitter @AmandaMarcotte