They work along
Speaking of Mister Coffee and the price of Cheerios, I missed one of Trump’s explosions of stupid a few days ago, before he had to call off the shutdown.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross caused a bit of a stir yesterday during a CNBC interview when he said, in reference to federal workers affected by the government shutdown who’ve turned to food banks. “I don’t really quite understand why.” A few hours later, a reporter asked Donald Trump about Ross’ comments, and the president replied:
“No, I haven’t heard the statement, but I – I do understand perhaps he should set it differently. Local people know who they are when they go for groceries and everything else. And I think what Wilbur was probably trying to say is that they will work along. I know banks are working along of – if you have mortgages, the mortgagees, the mortgage – the folks collecting the interest and all of those things, they work along.
“And that’s what happens in times like this. They know the people, they been dealing with them for years, and they work along. The grocery store – and I think that’s probably what Wilbur Ross meant.”
Ahhh yes. That’s what happens. Your local Safeway or Wegmans or Whole Foods or Piggly Wiggly, which sees hundreds or thousands of grocery-shoppers every day, is eager to “work along.” It fills your shopping cart with Cheerios and steaks and the finest whiskey and it tells you not to worry about paying until you get good and ready. Then the Wizard of Oz comes along and helps you climb into the balloon.
We actually have a local grocery store run by a local family here in town, and they are big and busy, and I can maybe see them “working along”, but not without something…forms, details, etc. No one knows me at that grocery store, and I have shopped there every other week for 13.5 years, and frequently drop in for small stuff in between those times. Our town only has 25,000 people, and most of those 25,000 know a handful of the people. The service people we use know us, because they come to our house to work on plumbing or electricity; our grocery store has no idea who we are.
In Trumpworld everybody lives on Walton Mountain.
In realworld, almost no one lives on Walton Mountain.
Actually, this just confirms what I have suspected all along. Trump is from off this planet. This is the only possible explanation of his total naivete on so many fundamental topics; say like banking. As in
Oh yes. Bankers are the most understanding and sympathetic of people; they DO have an image to maintain, and clearly do not want to sully that image by appearing to be motivated only by greed. That makes them, in between scandals and in terms of sought image, a bit like the local totally lustless priest .
So if say, some galah like Trump gets to be POTUS and decides it would be a good idea to shut off the pay of all civil servants and then when reality starts to bite changes his mind, the bankers see straight away that they could themselves be caught in that Trumptrap, and they understandably try to avoid it.
But for my part, I’d say Trump is most likely a Martian. It’s all eerily reminiscent of that weird old sci-fi movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Must see if my local video store has a copy. One damned thing leads to another.
https://dsnews.com/daily-dose/01-25-2019/president-trump-announces-deal-to-end-shutdown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8irvq0ml-Kk
SNL aired this sketch of It’s a Wonderful Life in 1986. I would ask Wilbur Ross if he could understand why George Bailey’s rage was cathartic 30 years ago, and if things have improved since the lending industry crashed the economy 10 years ago.
Trump knows that he can get away without making loan payments. He owes so much that it really doesn’t matter whether he pays it off. This is why fantastically rich and famous people are always getting into enormous debt…. and yet still manage to maintain an extravagant lifestyle. He’s amply demonstrated that he doesn’t care whether the people he owes money to actually really need that money; he lives in a world where he can always just get access to more money without even asking or doing anything to deserve it.
I can only assume he thinks this is just as easy for everyone else and they’re all too stupid or lazy to know it.
From Cory Doctorow:
https://boingboing.net/2019/01/30/sending-jobs-to-jina.html
Basically, Foxconn, which has a history of getting huge government subsidies to build factories to employ large numbers of people from in-state and then building something else that employs far fewer people from out of state has done it again.
This time, it has managed to get its hands on $4.1bn in subsidies to build a factory and is instead building a much smaller R&D facility with jobs likely filled by people from other states. If it manages to pony up the 1000 or so jobs it now promises, each job will have cost the state $4.1m.
The art of the deal.
latsot@6,
Trump was always able to exploit this little pearl of wisdom:
“If you owe the bank $100 that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.” — J. Paul Getty