Trump's Canadian Dairy agreement of "little use...too small and too far in the future to help." GOP doing nothing about Rural Broadband!!!

It turns out, Trump is gaslighting farmers for their vote and sending them a $12 billion bride for good measure. But will rural communities and dairy farmers let some city huckster con them?

Trump's trumped-up NAFTA renegotiation is a major swing and a miss, doing almost nothing, and get this, the tariffs Mexico and Canada slapped on ag, pork, and dairy products are still in place because of Trump's steel tariffs.

Trump's Smoke and Mirrors meant to deceive Dairy/AG Farmers Exposed: Why rural voters keep coming back to the Republicans for a few relaxed regulations, bad roads, and lousy broadband coverage is a mystery to me:

1. The renegotiated trade agreement between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada is of little use to the dairy farmers Trump insisted on helping, Federal Reserve banks in the Midwest are reporting.

2. Gains from the new agreement are seen as “too small and too far in the future to help dairy farmers,” the Chicago Fed reported in the central bank’s periodic report on economic conditions across its 12 districts.

3. The Chicago Fed reports “dairy farmers continued to struggle,” and Canada and Mexico kept their tariffs on pork, dairy and other agricultural products that they imposed in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum products imported to the U.S.

4. The Minneapolis Fed reported that “a substantial number of dairy operations have exited the business since the beginning of the year.”

Broken Rural Broadband Promise makes things Worse...thank you Republicans: At the same time Trump put farmers on the frontline in his trade war, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is putting off broadband rollout until he can put together perfect rural broadband maps that accurately show how bad the problem really is...I wish I were kidding: 

The FCC's current broadband maps grossly misstate where internet or wireless service exists and where it doesn't. One of the major reasons: The FCC has relied on wireless and broadband companies to report … but the agency doesn't check the data … providers only need to report advertised maximum speeds and not actual speeds.
 Pai blames the previous Democrat-led administration for creating the problem and says his administration has been left to clean up the mess. But he says this process will take some time to play out. "The maps as they currently stand aren't perfect," Pai said. "But our goal is to make sure with respect to wireless connectivity that we have a clear-cut idea about where those connections are and where they aren't."

 Republicans aren't that into you (rural voters) either:

The Trump ... infrastructure proposal called for $50 billion in rural spending, including on broadband, but so far neither his budget nor the Republican Congress have allocated additional funds for rural broadband deployment.

At a Senate Commerce Committee hearing in early October, Democrats and Republicans were critical of cuts the FCC has made to a program funded through its Universal Service Fund, which reimburses some of the costs for phone companies offering broadband in rural communities. Committee Chairman John Thune said Pai had committed to conducting a "thorough economic analysis on funding cuts" ... But no analysis has occurred and that cuts had increased by almost 25 percent.

Pai believes the "trickle-down theory" for rural high-speed broadband could work? Imagine what a smaller corporate tax cut and more revenue money going to total broadband coverage in the U.S.:

Pai argues that if the FCC limits the fees that big cities can charge wireless companies to deploy their 5G infrastructure, these carriers will be more willing to plow that money into rural broadband. But critics called this a false premise and does nothing more than strip local communities of negotiating power. "Saving money in New York of Los Angeles has zero impact on investment in Montana."

But pushing fiber closer to customers or directly to their door is expensive. An FCC report estimated it would take $40 billion to expand internet access to cover 98 percent of Americans and another $40 billion to deliver broadband to 100 percent of the US population. 

Archive: Looking for work? Where did all the jobs go?

It's funny how no one talks about why we don't have a lot of jobs left in the U.S. for every educational level.

jsonline: U.S. employers pulled back on hiring in April for the second straight month, a sobering reminder that the economy remains weak. The unemployment rate fell to 8.1%, but only because more people gave up looking for work.

The Labor Department said Friday that the economy added just 115,000 jobs in April. That's below March's upwardly revised 154,000 jobs and far fewer than the pace from earlier this year.

Here's another clip from the old Lou Dobbs show back in 2005, in the middle of the Bush years, that focused on the disappearing middle class. Interviewed; Greg Spotts, author of the book, American Jobs, who offers up some of the ways the U.S. could have had free trade agreements that worked.

We were warned back in 2005, and now we're seeing the results of NAFTA and CAFTA.



An archive surreal bonus: Bay Buchanan, no lefty, complaining about flat wages, shifting jobs overseas, and a warning about passing CAFTA. What was she smoking that day...?

Perot so Right, Gore so Wrong on NAFTA

After watching this embarrassing discussion between Al Gore and Ross Perot, I thought I would edit a few important clips together from those old debates, illustrating just how wrong Gore was on the subject. He's not wrong about climate change in my opinion, since I'm just as worried about pollution and particulates as he is about warming, but Gore sadly missed out on this one by a mile.

I remember thinking Perot made more sense when he advocated trying to bring other nations wages up to ours in our trade agreements, not down to theirs. Perot even dealt with that problem by explaining how wages will meet at some low point, destroying our country. How can you argu with this, from Perot:

"You trade with people who made money, you don't trade with the people who oppress their workers and they don't have any money."

How will those workers buy our goods, our exports, if they make only a dollar or two a day?

The Madness of the Democratic Party's Centrism

I thought it was interesting the administration was backing away from the disaster we all know as NAFTA. Here’s the recent uttering of neo-liberal centrism, as reported by Reuters:

It is not necessary to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement to honor President Barack Obama's campaign promise to add stronger labor and environmental provisions, said U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk … Obama said the United States should use the "hammer" of threatening to withdraw from NAFTA if Canada and Mexico did not agree to change the pact. Although most mainstream U.S. business and farm groups credit NAFTA with boosting U.S. exports and increasing economic efficiency in North America, union groups in many manufacturing states blame the pact for heavy job losses.

Of course the loss of manufacturing jobs is of little concern to free market Republicans who offer the displaced underfunded job retraining programs as the solution to losing ones lively hood. Enter the Democrats. Obama’s threat of withdrawal helped him win an election from a public already afraid of losing their jobs and homes due to the failed U.S. economic direction Bush and the Republicans were taking us. But corporatism has been firmly implanted in the minds of a formerly demoralized Democratic Party, thinking maybe the Republicans had made their case for unfettered globalization in the arena of public opinion, acquiescing to the now failed policy. Ignoring the statistical data below, the conviction less Democrats are now about to throw middle America under the bus according to the Financial Times:

The US recession has opened up the biggest gap between male and female unemployment rates since records began in 1948, as men bear the brunt of the economy’s contraction. Men have lost almost 80 per cent of the 5.1m jobs that have gone in the US since the recession started, pushing the male unemployment rate to 8.8 per cent. The female jobless rate has hit 7 per cent.

It also means that women could soon overtake men as the majority of the US labour force. Men have been disproportionately hurt because they dominate those industries that have been crushed: nine in every 10 construction workers are male, as are seven in every 10 manufacturing workers. These two sectors alone have lost almost 2.5m jobs. Women, in contrast, tend to hold more cyclically stable jobs and make up 75 per cent of the most insulated sectors of all: education and health care.

The widening gap between male and female joblessness means many US families are solely reliant on the income the woman brings in. Since women earn on average 20 per cent less than men, that is putting extra strain on many households.

Just what does it take to get somebodies attention these days?

U.S. Gift to World- Wage Gap Economics

Because of NAFTA, GAT and the World Trade Organization, major industrialized nations that had strong self sustaning economies are now dependant on cheap labor and imported goods.

Canada, which has had a healthy economy and budget surplus’s, is now falling victim to this race to the bottom trade formula. From the Candian Press, “Canada's rich are getting richer while the poor get poorer and the middle class stagnates, according to 2005 census data released May 1, 2008, by Statistics Canada. Between 1980 and 2005, median earnings among Canada's top earners rose more than 16 per cent while those in the bottom fifth saw their wages dip by 20 per cent.

“The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said the census report should set alarm bells ringing. The biggest economic boom since the 1960s has basically only boosted the rich…leaving the middle class stagnant and the poor worse off.”

“According to the centers senior economist, "In the 1960s, when the economy grew this rapidly, almost everybody got a bigger piece. In this generation of economic growth, the gains are accruing primarily to those on the top."

Sound familiar? The Bush administrations trade policies have ushered in this dramatic gap between the have’s and have nots. Working with other powerful governmental leaders, the citizen workers of these countries have been left out of the profit equation. Why governments refuse to get in on the action, collecting taxes and profiting from free market policies, is still a bit of a mystery to me. I can only surmise that government officials are merely setting themselves up for lucritive positions after public service.

New Democrat MPs said they are "alarmed and worried" about the data. "Most Canadians are stuck in neutral on income. The poorest of us are even worse off than we suspected." He said the economic and social policies of recent years have failed. "Successive Conservative and Liberal governments have blindly assumed that a rising tide lifts all boats," he said. "But obviously not all boats have risen and too many paddlers, in fact, have no boats."

One startling statistic: “Median earnings among those in the middle remained status quo, registering a mere 0.1 per cent increase over 25 years.” Imagine that, two and a half decades and a mere 0.1 per cent increase.

The Center’s conclusion? "It's a wakeup call for Canadians and their governments. You can't keep ignoring this, especially with financial storm clouds from the south moving into Canada. "This is not a sustainable trajectory."

That would make the U.S. that untoward neighbor, with it’s run down house, unkept yard and putrid smoke wafting over everyone in the community.