Maybe You Shouldn’t Have Borrowed So Much In The First Place … Tisk Tisk, So Foolish

Bigger than inflation: Trump burst open Miamians’ dissatisfaction with ‘rigged’ system | Opinion

If the results of Tuesday’s elections in Miami-Dade County are truly about “the economy, stupid” — as the old political slogan goes — it’s not very hard to see why.

When Donald Trump won the county, he flipped it from blue to red for the first time in a presidential election since 1988 and led a countywide wave for Republicans. That’s a big shift in a place where Hillary Clinton won by nearly 30 percentage points in 2016 and Joe Biden by seven in 2020.

Viewed through an economic lens, though, it makes sense.

South Florida has been struggling under the weight of skyrocketing housing costs and an extreme shortage of affordable homes. That’s a real life obstacle for many in South Florida who feel stuck — or sliding backwards — on the economic ladder.

Yes, the crisis has slightly abated, with rents down by a mere 2.1% in June. Some condo prices have dropped a lot, but that’s because of safety-related special assessments after the Surfside condo collapse. Single-family home sales slowed a bit recently but median prices still rose. Along the way, home ownership has become simply unattainable for too many, including the middle class.

At the same time, wages haven’t kept up. Income inequality, in a town where glittering high-rises soar and billionaires keep moving in, is an inescapable fact of life.

A Census Bureau survey found that more than three-quarters of South Floridians reported difficulty paying for normal household expenses in 2023, making greater Miami one of the most cost burdened metropolitan areas in the country.

Add inflation to the financial squeeze, and it’s no wonder South Florida voters may feel the system doesn’t work for them — or, to borrow Trump’s terminology, the whole thing is “rigged.”

The Democratic Party used to be known for looking out for “everyday people” but Trump is now donning that mantle, even if some of his policies — such as tariffs on imports — could create more inflation and chaos.

So when voters in majority-Hispanic Miami-Dade chose Trump and Republicans this year, it seems apparent they were voting for economic relief. As Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer noted this week, about 85% of Latino voters said their top election priority was the economy, according to a Pew Research Center Poll.

This economic emphasis in the election is not a fluke. Nor is it a single issue. It’s a complicated stew — astronomical housing costs, terrible insurance rates, wages that don’t keep up with costs, inflation at the grocery store — that leaves a lot of South Floridians out in the cold when it comes to the American dream.

It’s not a new phenomenon. Both parties are to blame for the deepening of income inequalities over the past decades. Most Americans know that, as big business became more profitable and politicians enriched themselves, their own financial security diminished.

Pull yourself up by the bootstraps? Middle class families used to be able to save money and buy a home or send their kids to college. They could retire with corporate pensions. Today those kinds of goals seem to be moving farther away, leaving the middle class without a clear upward path.

That safer, more stable life of their parents and grandparents is what many Trump voters envision when they embrace “Make America Great Again.” As much as critics dismiss that slogan as bigoted — after all, women, Black people and other minorities didn’t have the same rights for much of America’s history — that’s an oversimplification.

Trump understood something when he promised that he would bring America back to its period of greatness, whenever that may be. When you lose the middle class, as the Democrats clearly did in this election cycle, you’ll see it in the ballot box.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/bigger-than-inflation-trump-burst-open-miamians-dissatisfaction-with-rigged-system-opinion/ar-AA1tHpHt

Corporate Donors Guided Kamala Harris to Defeat

Rich donors like Mark Cuban boasted about their success in shaping Kamala Harris’s campaign and inducing her to ditch progressive economic policies. We shouldn’t let them shrug off responsibility for a disastrous defeat.

There’s a memorable scene in the film The Big Short involving the lightly fictionalized hedge fund manager Mark Baum. Baum is listening in horror as some real estate bros describe all the shady practices that have fueled the housing bubble in Florida. Halfway through the conversation, he brings his team aside and demands to know why the crooks would give up their secrets so easily.

“They’re not confessing,” his colleagues explain to him. “They’re bragging.”

A few weeks before the presidential election, the New York Times published an article about the influence of big donors over the Kamala Harris campaign based on not-so-humble bragging from the heights of corporate America. Now it reads much more like a confession. While Harris refused to distance herself from Joe Biden over the carnage in Gaza, she had no problem signaling her intention to scrap parts of his economic agenda that benefited working-class Americans but went down badly with the very rich.

The Times described “a steady stream of meetings and calls in which corporate executives and donors offer their thoughts on tax policy, financial regulation and other issues,” which had resulted in “a Democratic campaign that is far more open to corporate input than the one President Biden had led for much of the election cycle.”

According to one business executive, the Harris campaign was “definitely giving large corporations a seat at the table and giving them a voice,” in a way that marked “a significant difference from the Biden administration.”

The donors weighed in behind the scenes when Harris promised to ban “price gouging” for groceries and secured an immediate rollback on the pledge: “In the days after, Ms. Harris’s team clarified that the plan would apply only during emergencies and would mirror laws already in place in many states — a narrower concept that would not immediately address rising grocery prices.” Harris might have been left with little to say about one of the most pressing economic problems in the United States, but at least her corporate backers were happy.

Back in 2019, Joe Biden famously told an audience of rich donors in New York that they shouldn’t worry about minor reforms that would leave their wealth and power fully intact:

‘You all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins, but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.’

As well as making “remarks that indicate a less zealous approach to antitrust enforcement,” which went down very well on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, Harris explicitly rejected Biden’s plan to raise the capital gains tax to 39.6 percent. Billionaire Mark Cuban boasted that he had inundated the Harris campaign with “a never-ending stream of texts and calls and emails,” urging them to support various economic policies that would benefit his class: “The list is endless, and in all those areas I’ve seen something pop into her speech at some level.”

According to Cuban, the (very limited) shift to the left in the Democratic Party under the impact of the two Bernie Sanders campaigns would soon be a fading memory with Harris in charge:

‘ She says she’s open to inputs from independents and Republicans, she means it. She truly is open minded. I’ve put some wild things in her direction that they don’t laugh at. People are trying to say, “Here are the progressive and liberal principles that have always been the principles of the Democratic Party.” Those are gone. It’s Kamala Harris’s party now.’

At the time when he made this boast, Cuban presumably expected to have his feet well under the table of the next administration. When the results started coming in, Cuban swiftly congratulated Trump on his victory — “you won fair and square” — and offered congratulations to Elon Musk too.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/corporate-donors-guided-kamala-harris-to-defeat/ar-AA1tGVAI

Dems rage against Biden’s ‘arrogance’ after Harris loss

Democrats are directing their rage over losing the presidential race at Joe Biden, who they blame for setting up Kamala Harris for failure by not dropping out sooner.

They say his advancing age, questions over his mental acuity and deep unpopularity put Democrats at a sharp disadvantage. They are livid that they were forced to embrace a candidate who voters had made clear they did not want — and then stayed in the race long after it was clear he couldn’t win.

“He shouldn’t have run,” said Jim Manley, a top aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “This is no time to pull punches or be concerned about anyone’s feelings. He and his staff have done an enormous amount of damage to this country.”

According to interviews with nearly a dozen officials and party operatives, Biden squandered valuable months only to end in disaster on the debate stage. And by the time he decided to pass the torch, he had saddled Harris with too many challenges and far too little time to build a winning case for herself.

The fresh anger at Biden came as Democrats devolved into a round of recriminations following Tuesday’s decisive loss to Donald Trump, with officials struggling to explain why a majority of the electorate voted Republican for the first time in 20 years.

The loss, said supporters and critics alike, will put a lasting dent in a legacy that Biden built steadily over more than a half-century in politics, culminating in what he envisioned would be a resounding defeat of Trump and his divisive brand of politics. Instead, Biden’s presidency will now be inextricably linked with Trump’s return to the Oval Office and his legislative accomplishments risk getting undercut by his successor. It’s in part a consequence, some Democrats concluded, of Biden letting pride and ego cloud the sharp political judgment that had aided his long ascent to the White House.

“There was a Biden weariness,” James Zogby, a three-decade veteran of the Democratic National Committee, said of the shift among the electorate in recent years. “And he hung on too long.”

“People, for whatever reason, feel it was better four years ago — and I don’t think we could fight that,” said one longtime Democratic operative, pointing to the growing percentage of Latinos and Black voters who flipped to Trump. “We just have a bad brand right now.”

Several Democrats pointed to the administration’s handling of a spike in inflation as a key misstep. The White House initially dismissed it as a temporary phenomenon, and it took months for Biden to grasp the impact it was having on the electorate. The episode cost them credibility with voters and overshadowed the economic strides being made elsewhere.

“They didn’t jump on it fast enough,” said Mike Lux, a Democratic strategist and co-founder of Democracy Partners, who defended Biden’s record but lamented that it never took hold with working-class voters. “It was really hurting people, and we just didn’t respond in the way that we could have and should have on policy, to an extent, but definitely on communications.”

Biden, who had at one point in the 2020 campaign pledged to be a “bridge” candidate to a new generation, later based his run for reelection on the belief that only he could defeat Trump — even as he showed clear signs that, at 81, he was not the dynamic candidate of even four years ago. In polling dating back to 2023, more than three-quarters of Americans believed Biden was too old for office.

“They failed to see his inability to step up his game,” Zogby said of Biden’s top aides. “There was this sense that there was nobody out there who could do it.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/06/democrats-blame-biden-trump-win-00188092

‘Grueling and arduous’: A look back at Canada-U.S. relations during the first Trump presidency

Canadian political leaders are congratulating Donald Trump on winning back the U.S. presidency — a victory that raises stark questions about what Canada-U.S. relations will look like over the next four years.

During Trump’s first term in office, his administration sparred with Canada over trade issues, including the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and tariffs imposed on certain Canadian aluminum products.

Immigration also became a source of tension between the two countries when Trump announced a travel ban that affected several Muslim-majority countries — a move that prompted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to tout Canada’s immigration system.

These issues are expected to crop up again after Trump takes office in January. During his campaign, Trump promised to impose a minimum 10 per cent global tariff and stage mass deportations.

Almost immediately after taking office in 2017, Trump and his team called for the renegotiation of the NAFTA trade deal with Canada and Mexico — and threatened to give six months’ notice of the deal’s termination if those two countries didn’t play ball.

That kicked off 14 months of intense and often fractious negotiations between Canada and the U.S. A deal was finally reached in September 2018 and took effect in 2020. The new agreement also had a new name: the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)

Aaron Ettinger, an associate professor at Carleton University who specializes in U.S. foreign policy, said the negotiation process was “grueling and arduous,” although “things turned out okay for Canada in the end.”

“But the entirety of Canada’s economic prosperity was put on the line there,” Ettinger said.

The USMCA is up for review and renewal in 2026. Trump has vowed to reopen the agreement, but so did his election opponent Kamala Harris.

Trump has pledged to go after all undocumented immigrants in the United States and carry out mass deportations during his second term, a vow that has some experts asking whether there will be spillover effects for Canada.

Jason Kenney, who served as immigration minister under former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, told CBC News last week that Canada needs to take that prospect “very, very seriously” and warned that “we don’t have the ability to police” a sudden wave of newcomers.

On the heels of a G7 summit in Charlevoix, Que., Trump suddenly tweeted out personal attacks on Prime Minister Trudeau, calling him “very dishonest” and “weak.”

He was apparently reacting to remarks Trudeau made when he was pressed by reporters to respond to Trump’s tough talk on trade at a closing press conference. At the time, Canada and the U.S. were in NAFTA talks and at odds over adding a sunset provision to the new agreement.

Trudeau shut down the idea of a sunset provision and said “that’s not on the table.” The prime minister also said his government was going ahead with a plan to impose more than $16.5 billion in tariffs on U.S. goods.

In a separate tweet, Trump wrote that he instructed U.S. representatives to withdraw support for the summit’s closing communique and explore imposing tariffs on “automobiles flooding the U.S. market!”

When asked by reporters for his reaction to Trump’s tweets, and his thoughts on what Trump’s move could mean for the future of the G7, Trudeau didn’t answer.

Ettinger said that Trudeau’s relationship with Trump “started off promising but eventually became completely poisoned.”

“If Trudeau is still in power [when Trump takes office], it will be the worst start of a new president’s term in terms of prime ministerial [and] presidential relationships,” he added.

Ettinger also said that if Trudeau can “say all of the nice things about Donald Trump that Trump wants, then I can see that relationship being repaired.”

“But whether or not Justin Trudeau has the stomach to do that kind of thing is a whole other story,” Ettinger said.

Trump has promised to implement a minimum tariff of 10 per cent on all imports entering the United States during his second term. Sources have told CBC News that Trump’s allies have offered no assurances of a reprieve for Canada.

Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s former principal secretary, developed close relationships with some of Trump’s advisers during his first term. He told CBC’s The House that he’s “not sure there’s going to be a way of talking Donald Trump out of this.”

Butts also said Trump is not afraid to wield access to the U.S. market to get what he wants out of negotiations.

Canada already has started talks with members of Trump’s inner circle about avoiding new trade tariffs. The federal government has warned of retaliation on U.S. goods if the tariffs are imposed on Canada.

Ettinger said he expects Trump to impose the tariffs quickly and he doesn’t think Canada will get the exemption it wants.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-united-states-trump-1.7375698

Some one here asked about this yesterday:

‘The USMCA is up for review and renewal in 2026’