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What stupid shit has Trump done today?

Streathamite said:
That was aimed at bimble - and he is doing precisely that
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hello. I'm not a he. Don't think I was playing the victim either and still reckon 'what are you here' is pretty shit thing to say to anyone but I was drink-posting that night and happy to leave it there.

also please @ me next time you feel like having a pop its only polite.
 
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It took him three goes, and half an hour to correctly spell "heal". I'm not one to ridicule spelling, but that is just beyond incompetent.
 
Today in total inversions of reality we have....

The Moral Voice of Corporate America

“In this maelstrom, the most clarifying voice has been the voice of business,” he said. “These C.E.O.s have taken the risk to speak truth to power."
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Ironically, it reminded me of this in the LA Review of Books which compared the richest in society under neoliberalism today and in Nazi Germany

The salaries of the top one percent have increased from roughly eight percent of total income in the 1980s to a staggering 18 percent of total income today. While wages for the vast majority of Americans have remained largely stagnant for the past 35 years, the top one percent has seen growth by nearly 140 percent and of that massive income — so large as to actually exceed capital returns — nearly three-quarters goes to the tiny top 0.1 percent. The bulk of these “star salaries” do not come from, say, high-earning celebrities (artists, actors, athletes), but rather from individuals such as corporate executives, hedge fund managers, university presidents, etc. Piketty calls the individuals who comprise this top 0.1 percent “supermanagers.”

How do we explain this explosion in salaries? We could begin with the theory that high pay reflects a supermanager’s productivity and skills (i.e., large contributions to corporate profits), yet this does not hold up to scrutiny. To begin with, there is a very sharp discontinuity of salaries between those at the very top and those immediately below, where one would have expected a gradual increase if qualifications or professional experience were the key driver. Executive pay has been found to rise when sales and profits increase for reasons that are beyond a manager’s control (e.g., price fluctuations). Further, given the size and complexity of the modern corporation, it is difficult to determine what share of a firm’s performance can be directly linked to the skills of any particular executive manager or officer as opposed to the rest of workers. Controlled experiments (e.g., determining the performance of a different manager in the same environment) are impossible. Assessing performance on the basis of some “objective” measure, such as shareholder value, also proves difficult.

If “star salaries” can’t be explained by contribution to the productive enterprise, high managerial compensation would appear to be what economists call “rent” — essentially, profit extraction. Managers could quite simply have their “hands in the till,” or be facilitated in their ability to extract rent through bargaining power and market power (including a manager’s ability to bring to the table things that cannot easily be replaced or commoditized, like personal connections, or to make it costly for any potential replacement to take over). Piketty concludes that the rent element is probably high, with high pay for supermanagers an institutional practice shaped by social norms.

In our view there is another way to understand the rise of the supermanager in terms of value (though in a rather unconventional sense) produced for the firm. The supermanager is neoliberalism’s governance mechanism, a way to negotiate and smooth over differences between sectors of power in society, just as the supermanager avant la lettre did so in Nazi Germany
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J Ed said:
Today in total inversions of reality we have....

The Moral Voice of Corporate America

Ironically, it reminded me of this in the LA Review of Books which compared the richest in society under neoliberalism today and in Nazi Germany
Click to expand...
It is kind of silly for them to say the CEOs are taking a risk to speak truth to power. They are the power. The non-fat cats are pressuring him too, to deliver on promises he can't deliver on. They feel betrayed. They should.
Labor leaders, once courted by President Trump, are stepping up their campaign to turn workers against the White House if it does not deliver more on jobs and trade — and if it does not stop undoing Obama-era regulations. The most visible effort, which starts in Indianapolis on Monday afternoon, is a two-week tour organized by the coalition Good Jobs Nation that ropes in labor-friendly politicians. The coalition, launched in 2013 to pressure Barack Obama’s White House on trade and wage issues, is organizing rallies throughout the Midwest through Labor Day. “Trump ran as a working-class hero, so let’s look at the results,”...“We’re seven months into his administration, and wages are flat. People are still getting pink slips.”
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Labor groups step up pressure on Trump to deliver
 
In The New Yorker Carl Icahn’s Failed Raid on Washington
...
I spoke to someone who has seen the draft executive order, and he told me that it looked conspicuously like something that had been prepared by someone with no experience in Washington: “It was like ‘I, the President, instruct Scott Pruitt to move the point of obligation.’ It was almost amateurish. Any policy person or lawyer would understand that this thing was never going to fly.”

Several sources in Washington who have discussed the matter with Mike Catanzaro, the Trump Administration official who dealt with Icahn, told me that, once he and Gary Cohn had concluded that Icahn was attempting to hijack the policy process, they put a stop to it. One of the sources said, “I think Icahn thought if he told his pal Don, ‘This is a bad thing,’ and explained why it was stupid, Don would say, ‘God damn it, Carl, you’re right!’—and then the law would change. That’s not how it works down here. We have this thing called the Administrative Procedure Act.” Another source said, “Mike had to make clear that the government is not a vending machine—that it’s not here to profit the President’s friends.” He added, “Not everybody in this Administration necessarily sees it that way.”
...
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An intriguing tale of a major Trump swamp critter now departed. It does demonstrate what a gift the arrival of this ostentatiously plutocratic administration was perceived as the audaciously greedy Wall St types Trump idolises. Trump's attack on environmental regs promised big profits if played shrewdly. Points out that's been a quietly successful part of his administration. Even here Trump disappoints though as the article ends with the reality of the President needing the ethanol lobby and his corn belt voters more than Icahn's approbation.
 
J Ed said:
Today in total inversions of reality we have....

The Moral Voice of Corporate America



Ironically, it reminded me of this in the LA Review of Books which compared the richest in society under neoliberalism today and in Nazi Germany
Click to expand...

Clearly, the priority for the entire American Left must be to redouble its efforts to ensure these "super managers" are diversity compliant. But if this fails to instantly remedy three and half decades of wage stagnation and attendant grotesque disparities in every other sphere, then of course a re-think may be required.

Strategy review: 2052.
 
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TomUS said:
It is kind of silly for them to say the CEOs are taking a risk to speak truth to power. They are the power. The non-fat cats are pressuring him too, to deliver on promises he can't deliver on. They feel betrayed. They should.

Labor groups step up pressure on Trump to deliver
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Congratulations on a post that manages to reference politics beyond the two party system. I'm only half taking the piss as well.
 
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