Republicans Are Desperate To Shift The Blame For Their Catastrophic Response To The Pandemic-- How About China?

Above you see a Joe Biden ad that will run in 6 swing states that both sides think will determine the 2020 election, Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin-- cumulatively 111 electoral votes. (Bernie should tell Biden that he's making a mistake by not targeting Ohio and Iowa. And he might consider including Georgia and Montana as well.)

As NBC News' Sahil Kapur reported yesterday, the pandemic has turned "China" into a big campaign issue, one where even a corpse-like Biden can crush the credibility-free Trump. Trump's SuperPAC, America First Action, fired the first shot last week with $10 million worth of dishonest ads in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania attempting to project his own malfeasance with China onto Biden. The ad above is the Biden campaign's response. This ad by American Bridge-- $15 million worth but pretty weak-- is also on the air in swing states:





The context Kapur gave the story is that "The COVID-19 crisis has rocketed to the forefront of voter concerns as the official U.S. death toll tops 33,000 and sets up a battle over which candidate, Trump or Biden, can address public concerns about China as favorable opinions of the country nosedived in Gallup tracking polls. A Harris poll taken April 3-5 found that 72 percent of Americans believe China inaccurately reported the impacts of the coronavirus. It found that 69 percent favor Trump's trade policies against China and most want him to take a tougher position with that nation. A majority of Americans even said China should be required to pay other countries to compensate for damage and suffering caused by the spread of the virus. In the 2016 election, Trump successfully weaponized misgivings about China's trade practices, insisting that previous U.S. presidents, including his opponent Hillary Clinton's husband, had allowed the country to rip off Americans. He has slapped tariffs on Chinese products, which have at times drawn public resistance, in pursuit of overhauling trade relations with the country. Trump's strategy is to place a simple contrast in the minds of voters. In a recent fundraising email to supporters, he proclaimed, 'I am TOUGH ON CHINA and Sleepy Joe Biden is WEAK ON CHINA.'" But Trump's strategy is backfiring on him.

Snopes did some fact-checkin' last week:

In mid-April 2020, social media users shared a comment made by U.S. President Donald Trump at an April 14 press briefing and contrasted it with a previous tweet of Trump’s in an effort to highlight the president’s flip-flopping narrative on the Chinese government’s handling of the COVID-19 coronavirus disease outbreak in late 2019 and early 2020.

During the April press briefing, amid strong criticism of his own administration’s response to the pandemic, Trump announced he was planning to halt U.S. funding for the World Health Organization (WHO), strongly criticizing it for taking China’s assurances about its handling of the coronavirus outbreak “at face value” and for praising China’s “so-called transparency” in that regard.

In light of that, CNN White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins pressed Trump about a January 2020 tweet in which he, too, praised the Chinese government’s “transparency” in handling the crisis at that early juncture.

Snope contrasted that Trump lie with this Trump lie to find the statement true and the Trump[ist claims flat out false.

Meanwhile, New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman noted that the Republican Party Blame China strategy is being undermined by Trump's bumbling and incompetence. Voters blames the horribly dysfunctional GOP for the failed response to the pandemic-- which has led to more deaths in America and in any other country-- and with continued failure, to even bleaker prospects for the future. Martin and Haberman wrote that its a botched attempt "to divert attention from the administration’s heavily criticized response to the coronavirus by pinning the blame on China... Republicans increasingly believe that elevating China as an archenemy culpable for the spread of the virus, and harnessing America’s growing animosity toward Beijing, may be the best way to salvage a difficult election." Hence the deceitful campaign ad from Trump's SuperPAC... and it's a party wide endeavor.

Republican senators locked in difficult races are preparing commercials condemning China. Conservatives with future presidential ambitions of their own, like Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, are competing to see who can talk tougher toward the country where the virus first emerged. Party officials are publicly and privately brandishing polling data in hopes Mr. Trump will confront Beijing.

...But there is a potential impediment to the G.O.P. plan-- the leader of the party himself.

Eager to continue trade talks, uneasy about further rattling the markets and hungry to protect his relationship with President Xi Jinping at a moment when the United States is relying on China’s manufacturers for lifesaving medical supplies, Mr. Trump has repeatedly muddied Republican efforts to fault China.

Even as the president tries to rebut criticism of his slow response to the outbreak by highlighting his January travel restrictions on China, he has repeatedly called Mr. Xi a friend and said “we are dealing in good faith” with the repressive government. He also dropped his periodic references to the disease as “the China virus” after a telephone call with Mr. Xi.

Yet in private, he has vented about the country. Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota said he informed Mr. Trump in a Thursday telephone conversation that the meat processing plant in South Dakota suffering a virus outbreak is owned by a Chinese conglomerate. The president responded, “I’m getting tired of China,” according to Mr. Cramer.

It remains to be seen whether Mr. Trump’s conflicted messaging on China will hurt him with voters, who have repeatedly seen the president argue both sides of issues without suffering the harm that another politician would. And while Mr. Trump’s team knows that his own words will be used against him, they believe they can contrast his history favorably with that of Mr. Biden.

On Tuesday, at his daily briefing, Mr. Trump was candid about the transactional rationale behind his stance toward China. Pressed on how he could criticize the World Health Organization for what he called pushing “China’s misinformation,” after he had also lavished praise on Beijing’s purported transparency, he responded, “Well, I did a trade deal with China, where China is supposed to be spending $250 billion in our country.”

“I’d love to have a good relationship with China,” he added.

On Friday, however, he incorrectly posited that China must have the most deaths from the coronavirus-- the United States does-- and later said, “I’m not happy with China.”

...Candidates of both parties have targeted China in past campaigns. But with the United States entering a presidential election season as the Wuhan-borne contagion spreads across the country, the rhetoric this time is far more pointed-- with concern growing that it will fan xenophobia and discrimination against Asian-Americans.

It is especially striking to see a primarily internationalist Democratic Party and the traditionally business-friendly G.O.P. attempt to portray the other as captive to Beijing-- yet that only illustrates the electoral incentives at play.

...Trump’s clashing comments on China illustrate not only his unreliability as a political messenger but also his longstanding ambivalence over how to approach the world’s second-largest economy. He ran for president four years ago vowing to get tough with China, but his ambition was not to isolate the Chinese but to work with them-- and especially for the United States to make more money from the relationship.

This goal has prompted him to often lavish flattery on Mr. Xi, most memorably when Mr. Trump rhapsodized about the way they bonded over “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake you’ve ever seen” at his Mar-a-Lago resort in 2017.

The president’s hopes for securing a major trade agreement with China have been reinforced by a coterie of his advisers, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who have often prevailed in internal battles over White House hard-liners.

But with the coronavirus death toll growing and the economy at a standstill, polls show that Americans have never viewed China more negatively.

In a recent 17-state survey conducted by Mr. Trump’s campaign, 77 percent of voters agreed that China covered up the extent of the coronavirus outbreak, and 79 percent of voters indicated they did not think China had been truthful about the extent of infections and deaths, according to a Republican briefed on the poll.

Yet those polling numbers also come as 65 percent of Americans say they believe that Mr. Trump was too late responding to the outbreak, according to a Pew Research Center survey this past week.

More ominous for the president are some private Republican surveys that show him losing ground in key states like Michigan, where one recent poll has him losing by double digits, according to a Republican strategist who has seen it.

So as Mr. Biden unites the Democratic Party, Mr. Trump’s poll numbers are flagging and G.O.P. senators up for re-election find themselves significantly outraised by their Democratic rivals. That has led to a growing urgency in Republican ranks that the president should shelve his hopes for a lucrative rapprochement with China.

“At this moment in time a trade deal is not the right topic of discussion,” said Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, who said the pandemic had highlighted the country’s reliance on China in the same painful fashion that the oil crisis of the 1970s revealed how it was at the mercy of the Middle East. “This has exposed our dependency on China for P.P.E. and for critical drugs.”

...Few Republicans have been more outspoken than Mr. Cotton, an Arkansan who was warning about the virus at the start of the year when few lawmakers were paying attention, and has been urging Senate candidates to make China a centerpiece of their campaigns.

“China unleashed this pandemic on the world and they should pay the price,” Mr. Cotton said. “Congress and the president should work together to hold China accountable.”

Fortified by private polling his campaign conducted last year for his own re-election showing bipartisan disdain for China, Mr. Cotton’s top aides approached aides to Mr. Trump’s campaign last month and told them they planned to air an ad in Ohio, a few days before its scheduled primary, attacking Mr. Biden over China. But, according to Republicans familiar with the conversation, Mr. Trump’s campaign expressed little interest in coordinating with them.





Now, though, Mr. Trump’s campaign is effectively repurposing Mr. Cotton’s ad and lashing Mr. Biden in a commercial targeting the former vice president and his son.

The super PAC supporting Mr. Trump, America First, is airing ads on the same theme in swing states, showing video of Mr. Biden in 2011 saying that “a rising China is a positive development.”

And the president’s eldest son, Donald Jr., posted the spot on Twitter and sought to stamp a new nickname on the former vice president: “BeijingBiden.”

Brian O. Walsh, the president of America First Action, said the strategy builds on years of voter concerns about China.

“The China piece of this was part of the overall thinking far before coronavirus, because we knew its potency and its relevance,” Mr. Walsh said. “This just made it more potent and more relevant.”

Eve Of Destruction-- Handsome Dick Manitoba

Earlier I mentioned that the House subpoena for Mick Mulvaney is for this Friday. He won't show up. Who really cares though-- especially because something much more relevant is absolutely showing up on that day: the first solo album, Born In The Bronx, by Handsome Dick Manitoba, formerly lead singer of the legendary Dictators. On a personal note, the very last red (in in this case, pink) meat I ever ate was with the Dictators at a White Castle when they were shooting this picture for the inner sleeve of The Dictators Go Girl Crazy:

P.F. Sloan wrote "The Eve of Destruction" in 1964 and it was a #1 hit (in the U.S. and Canada and #3 in the U.K.) when it was released by Barry McGuire the following year, despite it being banned by many conservative radio station owners for giving aid and comfort to America's enemies in Vietnam. Among the bands that subsequently covered the song, before Handsome Dick, were The Turtles, Jan and Dean, the Grass Roots, Tiny Tim, John Thunders, The Dickies (a punk version on white or yellow vinyl), The Undead, DOA, Public Enemy, Christian rockers Crashdog and Larry Norman, and (not Christian rockers)  Psychic TV.

The eastern world it is explodin'
Violence flarin', bullets loadin'
You're old enough to kill but not for votin'
You don't believe in war, what's that gun you're totin'
And even the Jordan river has bodies floatin'
But you tell me over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction

Don't you understand, what I'm trying to say?
Can't you see the fears that I'm feeling today?
If the button is pushed, there's no running away
There'll be no one to save with the world in a grave
Take a look around you, boy, it's bound to scare you, boy
And you tell me over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction

Yeah, my blood's so mad, feels like coagulatin'
I'm sittin' here, just contemplatin'
I can't twist the truth, it knows no regulation
Handful of Senators don't pass legislation,
And marches alone can't bring integration
When human respect is disintegratin'
This whole crazy world is just too frustratin'
And you tell me over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction

Think of all the hate there is in Red China
Then take a look around to Selma, Alabama!
Ah, you may leave here, for four days in space
But when you return, it's the same old place
The poundin' of the drums, the pride and disgrace
You can bury your dead, but don't leave a trace
Hate your next-door-neighbour, but don't forget to say grace
And you tell me over and over and over and over again my friend
You don't believe we're on the eve of destruction
No no you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction

Jon Tiven, who's playing organ on the Handsome Dick version, produced it and used PF Sloan's background vocals. Here's the version the Red Rockers did for my label, 415 Records, on their album Good As Gold in 1983, which was produced by David Kahne who I believe was the one who suggested the band cover the song. Sounds great, right? And the video looks good, but CBS, which had bought my label by then, ignored it the same way the DCCC ignores all the good congressional candidates. Exactly the same way.

As Long As Trump Is In The White House, Our Nation Is Not Safe

Tweeter by Nancy Ohanian

A new CNN poll was released yesterday afternoon and the dip in favorable ratings for Trump-- from 42% to 41%-- was too small to be significant. It will have to be consistently below 33% before Senate Republicans give Pelosi the go ahead to start impeachment-- and by that time she may feel Democrats will be better off with him on top of the ticket than off it.

The mid-March poll showed most of the half dozen Democrats they polled either below water or unknown by the general electorate. Only Bernie had more people liking him than disliking him:

• Cory Booker- minus 1 favorability with 48% either not knowing who he is or having no opinion
• John Hickenlooper- minus 2 favorability with 82% either not knowing who he is or having no opinion
• Jay Inslee- equal favorable/unfavorable (7%), with 86% either not knowing who he is or having no opinion
• Amy Klobuchar- minus 4 favorability, with 68% either not knowing who she is or having no opinion
• Bernie- plus 3 favorability, with just 11% either not knowing who he is or having no opinion
• Beto- minus 2 favorability, with 46% either not knowing who he is or having no opinion

This is for Democrats and for independents who lean blue only:

This question stands out: "How enthusiastic would you say you are about voting for president in next year’s election-- extremely enthusiastic, very enthusiastic, somewhat enthusiastic, not too enthusiastic, or not at all enthusiastic?" Look at that big spike between this cycle and... any other cycle!

Measuring enthusiasm for the various Democratic candidates between early October and now:

• Biden- dropped from 33% to 28%
• Bernie- rose from 13% to 20%
• Kamala- rose from 9% two 12%
• Beto- rose from 4% to 11%
• Elizabeth Warren- dropped from 8% to 6%
• Cory Booker- dropped from 5% to 3%
• Klobuchar- rose from 1% to 3%
• Castro- rose from zero to 1%
• Gillibrand- flat at 1%
• Inslee- rose from zero to 1%
• Mayor Pete- rose from zero to 1%
• Hickenlooper- rose from zero to 1%
• Tulsi- flat at zero
• John Delaney- flat at zero
• Terry McAuliffe- flat at zero

Biden is carefully planning a grand announcement of a fourth or fifth or sixth presidential campaign-- who can keep count?-- but, according to today's Wall Street Journal, he has, of course, already reached out to the wealthy bundlers who have helped fund his very long anti-working family career. At least a half-dozen supporters got calls from him yesterday "to tell them he intends to run for president and to ask for their help in lining up contributions from major donors so he can quickly raise several million dollars... [He] has expressed concern to these people that he wouldn’t be able to raise millions of dollars in online donations immediately the way some other Democratic candidates have." Do you ever wonder why he can't?

Trump loves that good ole tabloid drama and he spent the last couple of days fighting with Kellyanne Conway's husband and John McCain's corpse. George Conway certainly got the better of him but corpses can't punch back. I don't expect that Peter Wehner-- who served in the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations and is now a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think-- was thinking his Atlantic piece this week, A Damaged Soul and a Disordered Personality would help Trump's chances at reelection. His first sentence is simple: "Donald Trump is not well." Wehner is weirded out by Trump's "weird obsession with a dead war hero."



For Wehner these "grotesque attacks once again force us to grapple with a perennial question of the Trump era." For him it's the danger that if we "allow Trump to succeed in keeping us in a state of constant agitation and moral consternation, in ways that are unhealthy and even play to Trump’s advantage, allowing him to control the nation’s conversation. But that view, which might apply in some circumstances, shouldn’t apply in all circumstances. The real danger in so desensitizing ourselves to Trump’s tweets is that we normalize deviant behavior and begin to accept what is unacceptable."

A culture lives or dies based on its allegiance to unwritten rules of conduct and unstated norms, on the signals sent about what kind of conduct constitutes good character and honor and what kind of conduct constitutes dishonor and corruption. Like each of us, our leaders are all too human, flawed and imperfect. But that reality can’t make us indifferent or cynical when it comes to holding those in authority to reasonable moral standards. After all, cultures are shaped by the words and deeds that leaders, including political leaders, validate or invalidate

“To his equals he was condescending; to his inferiors kind; and to the dear object of his affections exemplarily tender,” Henry Lee said in his eulogy of George Washington. “Correct throughout, vice shuddered in his presence, and virtue always felt his fostering hand; the purity of his private character gave effulgence to his public virtues.”

But the other reason we should pay attention to the tweets and other comments by the president is that they are shafts of light that illuminate not only his damaged soul, but his disordered personality.

It doesn’t take a person with an advanced degree in psychology to see Trump’s narcissism and lack of empathy, his vindictiveness and pathological lying, his impulsivity and callousness, his inability to be guided by norms, or his shamelessness and dehumanization of those who do not abide his wishes. His condition is getting worse, not better—and there are now fewer people in the administration able to contain the president and act as a check on his worst impulses.

This constellation of characteristics would be worrisome in a banker or a high-school teacher, in an aircraft machinist or a warehouse manager, in a gas-station attendant or a truck driver. To have them define the personality of an American president is downright alarming.

Whether the worst scenarios come to pass or not is right now unknowable. But what we do know is that the president is a person who seems to draw energy and purpose from maliciousness and transgressive acts, from creating enmity among people of different races, religions, and backgrounds, and from attacking the weak, the honorable, and even the dead.

Donald Trump is not well, and as long as he is president, our nation is not safe.

I wonder if Pelosi and Nadler get that-- grok it. It looks like House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) does. Yesterday he told NBC News that Trump and his family of predatory grifters are "the greatest threats to democracy in my lifetime"-- and then compared Trump to Hitler. And Pelosi is playing games with impeachment? Hitler! Meanwhile, Yahoo News reported this morning that Reagan's daughter, Patti Davis, told them that her father would be "horrified" by the state of the U.S. and the Republican Party under Trump. "I think he would be horrified. I think he would be heartbroken-- because he loved this country a lot and he believed in this country."

Nazis In Unpop Culture

A month or so ago, rock journalist Steve Knopper called me to discuss how punk music pushed back against Nazis who tried infiltrating the early anarchistic punk music scene. Fascists in London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York seemed drawn to the scene's iconography, rowdiness and anti-establishment perspective. Soon after I went off to Thailand-- the Land of Smiles-- and forgot all about it. This week Steve's story, Nazi Punks F**k Off: How Black Flag, Bad Brains, and More Took Back Their Scene from White Supremacists was published by GQ. First paragraph:

Every hardcore band you loved in the '80s and beyond, from Black Flag to Minutemen to Fugazi, had one unfortunate thing in common: Nazi skinheads occasionally stormed their concerts, stomped their fans, gave Hitler salutes in lieu of applauding, and generally turned a communal experience into one full of hatred and conflict. Punk rockers had flirted with fascist imagery for shock value, with the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious and Siouxsie Sioux wearing swastikas in public, but, as early San Francisco scenester Howie Klein, later president of Reprise Records, recalls: “Suddenly, you had people who were part of the scene who didn’t understand ‘fascist bad.’”

I watched in horror as bands, and their supporters, tried to out-do each other in outrageousness in the mid to late '70s. The idea is that if you could piss off your parents and other authority figures, you were succeeding (at something). At the time I had a punk label in San Francisco and our first signing was the most popular local band, The Nuns. Our very first release, a 3-song 7" EP-- looked vaguely Nazi-ish:

There were 3 singers-- one was Jewish, one was gay and one was an art school woman and the guitar player was from a prominent socially conscious Latino family. The song was "Decadent Jew," a live version of which from 1978 is posted above. The Jewish singer uses the N-word. At one point Bill Graham said he would manage the band if they stopped performing the song; they refused. The two other songs on the record were "Suicide Child" and "Savage." They got a lot of attention, which was the whole idea and the way to compete. The fans picked up on the vibe and were soon out-of-control, especially when the scene went from an ironic art school in-crowd joke, to a way for suburbanites to blow off some steam.

By 1980, a more violent strain of punk fans was infecting punk shows. “Pogoing became slam-dancing, now known as moshing, and some of ’em didn’t seem like they were there to enjoy the music, as much as they were there to beat up on people-- sometimes in a really chickenshit way,” says Jello Biafra, whose band, Dead Kennedys, put out a classic song about it in 1981: "Nazi Punks Fuck Off."

Many of the more conscious scene leaders, like Joe Strummer and Mick Jones (from The Clash), Jello Biafra (from the Dead Kennedys), Joey and Tommy Ramone (though not Johnny or Dee Dee) were having misgivings and feeling some responsibility very early on. The bands that didn't give a shit-- or even encouraged and exploited the worst aspects (like the Sex Pistols)-- were cooler, at least in some circles.

Knopper then puts the 3 decade old movement into the context of "the era of Trump and the alt-right, Charlottesville, and 'very fine people on both sides,' [when] fighting Nazis is sadly newly relevant, and veterans of the hardcore-vs.-skinheads battles of yore are happy to help with war stories and advice." The rest of his piece is a very worthwhile oral history on how punks took back their scene, featuring, among others, Black Flag's Henry Rollins, Mike Watt from Minutemen, Darryl Jenifer of Bad Brains and Camper Van Beethoven's David Lowery. I should have told Knopper to include Penelope Houston from The Avengers. Last night she surprised me with her recollection. "The Avengers broke up in mid-79. We didn't seem to attract super narrow-minded fans. I think the Nazis coming to punk gigs happened years after that, but I wasn't there. I'd made my way into more arty or folky kinds of punk: Human Hands, Monitor, B-People, Violent Femmes, after hardcore reared it's nearly shaved little head. There was one time some dudes from the suburbs came to our show at the Mabuhay and started punching people in the audience. We just stopped playing. This was in a pre-pit, pogo-esque time period. I still don't get why some people say the Avengers were the first hardcore band. We were not having it."



Darren Hill was the bass player-- and the brains behind-- the Red Rockers, a band on my label, 415 Records. They had come from Metairie, Louisiana, home of KKK Grand Wizard or Dragon (and Republican state legislator) David Duke. The Red Rockers were nothing like David Duke-- and when their first album was released they were often referred to as "the American Clash." Today Darren manages Paul Westerberg of The Replacements. I asked him to read Knopper's story and give me some input.

We knew that Nazi imagery had been adopted by some of the punk pioneers strictly for it’s shock value. That always made me uneasy but I never imagined that anyone in our scene would actually adopt their ethos.

Slam dancing had become a thing at our shows in New Orleans but it was harmless fun for the most part. Occasionally ignorant and testosterone fueled jocks would come out and misinterpret what was going on. They thought it was some kind of sport and started hurting people-- even girls.

We did a pretty good job policing it though-- stopping the show and calling them out. Ridicule and shaming was pretty effective because they were outnumbered.

It wasn’t until we hit the road that we encountered real Nazi Punks for the first time. I couldn’t believe it. This is a real thing? What in the hell are you doing at our show? Do you know what we’re about? Have you ever listened to our lyrics? We went from awareness and singing “Springtime for Hitler” in the van to the cognizance that this was real and dangerous… and very, very frightening.

By the time we returned home they had infiltrated OUR scene. The vilolence had spun up several notches and we could no longer control it-- to the point that the club we played at all the time had to ban us due to the violent element. I always believed that violence begets violence but there was no reasoning with these animals. Failed attempts and a black eye led to the realization that they were not just ignorant, they were brainwashed. We understood that we had to defend ourselves and our scene. The next time we hit the road, we took our friend out as a roadie-- the only employee we could afford at the time. He was a six-foot-four 260 pound hulk of African/Puerto Rican decent. Picture a NFL linebacker with a mohawk in a kilt. He couldn’t tune a guitar to save his life but probably saved our lives a few times. He would slowly skank across the stage while we played always keeping an eye on the crowd. If he saw any sign of trouble he would leap down into the middle of it and dance, then jump back up and resume skanking. He was actually quite graceful for such a big man. He was so intimidating yet peaceful and we never had a problem after that.

Years later, in the late 90’s, I was managing the Dropkick Murphys. There was a resurgence of the skinhead movement and they adopted the band as their own. Even though the band denounced them, there was still a huge presence at the shows. There was freightening confrontation at a Warped Tour show one year in Salt Lake City. The band’s vastly outnumbered crew stood up to a literal army of bad skins that day in what can only be described as a battle. What can I say, our guys were from Boston. Luckily there were no serious injuries and the skinheads were chased off in shame. There was a serious threat of retaliation if the band ever came back to SLC so we stayed out of the market for a while. Fortunately that dissipated over time.

Those who believe in hate cannot feel empowered and be allowed to grow. Charlottesville reminded me of this.

Stock Tip: Buy Shares In Fact Checking Companies-- Outlook Is Very Bullish For The Next 4 Years

Hours before Trump's sparsely-attended inauguration, Fox News-- which Señor Trumpanzee doesn't call Fake News (but which usually is) released a new poll showing that 37% of Americans approve of the new president, while 54% do not. It's not likely the bleak inaugural address neo-Nazi Steve Bannon wrote for Trump to read, bolstered those numbers. The speech wasn't just dark and-- sorry Kellyanne-- inelegant; it was filled with distortions and outright lies. It was, predictably, more Trump gaslighting. PolitiFact bore witness to Trump/Bannon's serial lies in real time and Glenn Kessler fact-checked the speech for Washington Post readers. It was filled with lies, lies that immediately became... Fake News. Overall, Bannon's dystopian vision, delivered by Trump, presented "a portrait of the United States that often was at variance with reality." It was exactly what Russia would have liked to see presented.

“You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before.”

No matter how you measure it, the “movement” was not as historic as Trump proclaims it to be.

Trump is a minority president, in terms of the popular vote. He lost the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million votes to Hillary Clinton. Clinton had the largest popular vote margin of any losing presidential candidate, according to an analysis by the Associated Press.

Trump’s electoral college win, meanwhile, was a squeaker. Trump had narrow victories in three key states (and narrow losses in two others). He won Michigan by 10,704 votes, Wisconsin by 22,177 votes and Pennsylvania by 46,435 votes. So if 39,659 voters in those states had switched their votes, 46 electoral votes would have flipped to Clinton-- and she would have won 278-260.

Overall, according to a tally by John Pitney of Claremont McKenna College, Trump ranks 46th out of 58 electoral college results.

“Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities … and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

Trump repeats a problematic talking point about crime and poverty in “inner cities.” It’s unclear what he means by “inner cities,” which is not a category by which crime or poverty is measured.

In 2015, 13 percent of people lived below poverty level inside metropolitan statistical areas, according to census data. That is on par with the national poverty rate in 2015, which was 13.5 percent. Overall, the poverty rate has remained relatively flat under Obama.

As we have repeatedly pointed out, violent and property crimes overall have been declining for about two decades, and are far below rates seen one or two decades ago. Homicides have spiked in major cities in 2015 and 2016, but the rates remain far below their peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidized the armies of other countries, while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military.”

Trump mixes up several things here. He seems to be referring to free-trade agreements in the first part of his sentence, though he ignores the fact that many U.S. industries also benefit and grow when they are able to sell products overseas.

As for subsidizing the armies of other countries, Trump appears to be referring to military bases that the United States has overseas. A 2013 Senate report found that the United States spent $10 billion a year on bases abroad, with 70 percent focused on three countries-- Germany, South Korea and Japan. Germany is the center of European defense obligations, while the troops in Japan are the core of U.S. projection of power in Asia. The troops in Korea deter an attack by North Korea. Given a defense budget of more than $500 billion, the cost of maintaining these bases is a mere pittance.

The United States doles out about $6 billion a year in foreign military financing, with most of it going to just two countries: Israel and Egypt. But this money comes with a catch-- most of it must be spent on U.S. hardware, creating jobs for Americans.

As for the “very sad depletion” of the U.S. military, this is hyper-exaggeration. One can argue about whether the military budget should be boosted, but there is no question that the U.S. military is stronger and more capable than any other nation’s. The website Globalfirepower.com ranks countries based on 45 factors, and the United States tops the charts. Here’s one small statistic: The United States has 19 aircraft carriers, as of the end of last year; no other country has more than four.

“[We’ve] spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay. We’ve made other countries rich, while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon.”

Trump appears to be referring to U.S. involvement in military adventures, such as the 2003 Iraq invasion he supported, and possibly foreign aid.

Foreign aid amounts to less than 1 percent of the U.S. budget, with about $18 billion going to economic and development aid and $8 billion for security assistance. Even the Marshall Plan advanced by President Harry S. Truman, designed to stabilize Europe after World War II, was only a little over $100 billion in today’s dollars.

So Trump only gets to “trillions and trillions of dollars” by including wars. The Iraq war is estimated to have cost $1.7 trillion through 2013, though one estimate says that the cost will rise to $6 trillion through 2053, primarily from paying the interest on the debt incurred to wage the war because the Bush administration chose not to raise the taxes to pay for it. But we doubt Iraqis would say the war made the country “rich.”

Contrary to Trump’s rhetoric, the United States is far wealthier than other nations. According to the International Monetary Fund, the United States has a gross domestic product of $18 trillion, one-third larger than that of China, the nearest rival and a frequent target of Trump’s attacks.

A Pew Research Center analysis found that the vast majority of Americans are either upper-middle income or high income; many Americans who are classified as “poor” by the U.S. government would be middle income globally.

“One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions and millions of American workers that were left behind. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed all across the world.”

Trump again engages in hyperbole, attributing all of the decline in manufacturing to foreign trade.

The number of U.S. workers engaged in manufacturing is now about 12.3 million, up from 11.5 million in 2010, after the Great Recession hurt many manufacturers. But that’s still a decline from about 17 million in the 1990s.

Some analysts calculate that between 1 million and 2 million U.S. jobs were lost after China was admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2000. But economists believe the biggest factor in the decline in manufacturing is automation, not jobs going overseas. Another factor is decreased consumer spending on manufactured goods. A new report by the Congressional Research Service notes that “employment in manufacturing has fallen in most major manufacturing countries over the past quarter-century,” so the U.S. experience is not unusual.

Meanwhile, the official unemployment rate is 4.7 percent, down from a high of 10 percent in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Jobs have been added for a record 75 months.

“We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.”

Trump continues to attack companies that ship jobs overseas, and has promised to keep jobs in the United States. But Trump has had a long history of outsourcing a variety of his products as a businessman, and he has acknowledged doing so.

We know of at least 12 countries where Trump products were manufactured. Further, Trump products transited other countries through the packaging and shipping process-- meaning that workers in more than 12 countries contributed to getting many of Trump’s products made, packaged and delivered to the United States.

Here’s our inventory of Trump’s products made overseas.

“We will get our people off of welfare and back to work, rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor.”

“Welfare” is a broad term and can apply to people who are working but receiving some government assistance. If someone is receiving means-tested assistance, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are not working.

Not all people eligible for welfare collect benefits. When they do, many of the benefits are contingent on the recipients working or actively searching for jobs, as a result of an overhaul of welfare signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. And even low-income families receive some level of public assistance.

According to the 2012 U.S. Census, about 23 percent of U.S. households with at least one person with a job received means-tested benefits.

Meanwhile, Trump is apparently unaware that participation has declined in means-tested programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps).

Caseloads in the TANF program have declined over the past 15 years, from about 2.4 million families to 1.6 million families. After its post-recession peak in 2013, the number of people receiving food stamps has declined. In October 2016, there were 43.2 million people participating in the program, compared to 47 million in October 2013.

Señor Trumpanzee claims the sad and worst-attended inauguration ever, had a million and a half people, part of his gaslighting strategy to drive America insane

Meanwhile, "the Interior Department was ordered Friday to shut down its official Twitter accounts-- indefinitely-- after the National Park Service shared two unsympathetic tweets during President Trump’s inauguration. The first noted the new president’s relatively small inaugural crowd compared to the number of people former president Barack Obama drew to the National Mall when he was sworn into office in 2009. The second tweet noted several omissions of policy areas on the new White House website. A Park Service employee retweeted both missives on Friday."

“All bureaus and the department have been directed by incoming administration to shut down Twitter platforms immediately until further notice,” said an email circulated to Park Service employees Friday afternoon.

No news, but Fake News, is tolerated by a tyranny. Recently a movie company contacted me about a song my small indie label, 415 Records, released in 1981, "Teenage Underground" by the Red Rockers, from the New Orleans based band's debut album, Condition Red. Films and TV shows have used some of the band's later, more commercial songs, especially their big hit China, as well as Good As Gold, Blood From A Stone and their cover of the classic :Eve of Destruction" (embedded up top). But this film, Pitching Tents, which should be out in the next few months, was looking for a different sound and a different message, one that fits the newly Trumpified America. Take a listen to what they chose (first film use of the 26-year old song ever):




UPDATE: New York Times Weighs In On Trumpanzee Lies

The women’s march in Washington was roughly three times the size of the audience at President Trump’s inauguration, crowd counting experts said Saturday.

Marcel Altenburg and Keith Still, crowd scientists at Manchester Metropolitan University in Britain, analyzed photographs and video taken of the National Mall and vicinity and estimated that there were about 160,000 people in those areas in the hour leading up to Mr. Trump’s speech Friday.

They estimated that at least 470,000 people were at the women’s march in Washington in the areas on and near the mall at about 2 p.m. Saturday.

The two images below show the crowds when they were at their peak density at the two events.

Life Of Crime... And So On

This week, I had a call from Steve Knopper, a writer doing a story for Billboard, about how musicians may look at their responsibility to call attention to the political anomalies around Trump and Trumpism. I'll share that with you when it's published next week. Usually when people ask me if I'm involved in the music business any longer I just say "no" or, if I'm feeling garrulous, "no, thank God." In fact when Steve asked me a question for a post-Nirvana period book he's writing, all I could do was offer to talk about how in 1994, the midterm election after Bill Clinton's first victory, saw a loss of 54 Democratic House seats and the rise of Newt Gingrich... but that my mind was blank about anything to do with music of the period other than how we had a huge success with Candlebox in that period. He didn't seem interested in hearing that Ted Strickland, Jack Brooks, Dan Rostenkowski, Maria Cantwell, Jay Inslee, Speaker Tom Foley and Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky all lost their seats that year. Alas, who would be? That said, just hours later I got three music-related e-mails.

The first came from the producer of a film, Pitching Tents who is locking down the score and trailer and is eager to use a song my own little company publishes, "Teenage Underground" by the Red Rockers. Here listen:



I should have told Steve Knopper to call them about how singers and songwriters are going to react to Trump. You can probably guess how the Red Rockers would react. They also recorded Guns of Revolution, the song that persuaded me to sign them to my little indie label, and Dead Heroes. I did mention Bodycount to Steve. That was Ice-T's rock band that got into some trouble for their song, "Cop Killer." I was the executive producer. It's a little harsh but listen:



Why bring that up? That was the second e-mail. It was from a sociology professor at Cal State Long Beach telling me one of her students asked her to invite me to speak to her class about censorship. I'm going to.

The third e-mail was from Johnny Strike, who I haven't been in contact with in a couple of decades. He was one of the singer/guitar players in San Francisco's legendary punk rock pioneers, Crime. Crime was mostly Johnny plus Frankie Fix who I believe died about 20 years ago. But there were a delightful cast of characters over the years I lived in San Francisco who came and went from Crime and two of them-- Hank Rank and Joey D'Kaye-- are, according to Johnny's e-mail joining him in a new recording project, Naked Beast. LP out in 2017. I can't wait. Meanwhile, I didn't even realize that Johnny Strike is an author and has a new book out, Name of the Stranger. He described the new music as "Crimey but also experimental." Want to hear what "Crimey" sounds like? This is Crime's classic first single, "Hot Wire My Heart" b/w "Baby You're So Repulsive" from late 1976. This is what I used to play on my radio show:





UPDATE: New Old Pic

Johnny just sent me this, a photo, probably backstage at the Mabuhay in 1977, of Crime's Frankie Fix and Johnny Strike and yours truly in the middle. The world has changed so much since then! (I'm pretty sure I was wearing a Jefferson Starship promo jacket in the photo that Craig Chaquico gave me in return for a compromising audio tape.)

China-- Danced With Wind And Danced With Fire

In June my friend Qiao Li explained the concept of China's Naked Officials for us:

"Naked officials" (裸体官员) are Chinese bureaucrats who send their family members overseas with the illegal assets they amassed through corruption and graft. These officials are “naked” as they are the only ones left behind, working hard to accumulate and funnel capitals overseas under the names of their relatives to popular destinations like the U.S., Canada and the U.K, investing their transferred funds in financial, real estate, energy, and other lucrative sectors. Banking on bribes to allow forced demolition, business deals, black jails, and news cover up, these “naked officials” not only use their wealth and power to sideline competing business interests, their immense economic clout obtained through official capacity also allows them to defeat other political factions within the party.

…The number of "naked officials" might be a small bunch, but they play an important role in the larger picture of global inequality. Since post-reform, Capitalism has become the new secular religion in China. While the government brutally cracks down on other popular religions and is fast to demolish Christian churches, no officials dare to criticize the wrongs done by unchecked Capitalism. The fleeing of these “naked officials” is a testament that China’s impressive growth will not sustain if inequality is left unaddressed.

The Wall Street Journal's Andrew Browne would have done well to take a look at Qiao Li's analysis of "naked officials" before his own piece on The Great Chinese Exodus this weekend. I'm sure many are leaving for "cleaner air, better schools and more opportunity," by corruption figures into the calculus her far more than Browne acknowledges. "A recent report," he wrote, "showed that 64% of China's rich are either migrating overseas or have plans to leave the country." And of the 100 million Chinese-- including tourists on vacation, of course ("the Chinese have overtaken Americans to become the world's biggest tourist spenders…The international hotel industry is increasingly tailoring its service to Chinese tastes")-- who left China last year, "rapidly growing numbers are college students and the wealthy, and many of them stay away for good. A survey by the Shanghai research firm Hurun Report shows that 64% of China's rich-- defined as those with assets of more than $1.6 million-- are either emigrating or planning to.

The decision to go is often a mix of push and pull. The elite are discovering that they can buy a comfortable lifestyle at surprisingly affordable prices in places such as California and the Australian Gold Coast, while no amount of money can purchase an escape in China from the immense problems afflicting its urban society: pollution, food safety, a broken education system. The new political era of President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, has created as much anxiety as hope.

Another aspect of this massive population outflow hasn't yet drawn much attention. Whatever their motives and wherever they go, those who depart will be shadowed by the organs of the Leninist state they've left behind. A sprawling bureaucracy-- the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council-- exists to ensure that distance from the motherland doesn't dull their patriotism. Its goal is to safeguard loyalty to the Communist Party.

This often sets up an awkward dynamic between Chinese arrivals and the societies that take them in. While the newcomers try to fit in, Beijing makes every effort to use them in its campaign to project its political values, enhance its global image, harass its opponents and promote the use of standard Mandarin Chinese over the dialects spoken in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

…A college professor, who insisted on anonymity altogether ("Just call me an intellectual," he says), takes a darker view of China's prospects as he prepares to emigrate to the U.S., joining his two children, who both have postgraduate degrees from U.S. colleges.

Like many Chinese academics, the professor has a business or two on the side, although he hardly looks the part of an executive, unshaven and with crumpled pants riding 6 inches above his open sandals. In China, he pronounces, "Once you get rich, they arrest you."

That is an exaggeration, of course, but there is a propensity for entrepreneurs who appear on lists of the richest Chinese to end up in jail.

His real concern is that to get ahead, he's had to make compromises with his principles (he doesn't say bribes, but that is what he means). "I've been forced to prostitute myself," he says, and now he worries that it could all be snatched away. In China, a weak, corrupt legal system may sometimes work in favor of entrepreneurs while they're clawing their way up, cutting corners along the way, but it is almost always a liability once they've made it.

First-generation businessmen-- the ones who powered China's economic rise-- now dream of a secure retirement. That means legal safety in places like the U.S. and Canada.

…The flight of the rich recalls similar outflows from Hong Kong before the 1997 handover of the then-British colony to China and from Taiwan in an earlier period when its own future seemed imperiled. In those cases, businesspeople parked their families in places like Vancouver and Seattle and shuttled back and forth to Asia for business.

That is often the strategy in today's China, which has entered an uncertain transition. The economy is off the boil; property prices are sliding. Mr. Xi has amassed more power than any Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping and is using it to crack down on corrupt officials while going after human rights lawyers, bloggers and civil society activists. That is ridding China of the kind of individual its government doesn't want but is also scaring away the creative types it needs.

Last year, the U.S. issued 6,895 visas to Chinese nationals under the EB-5 program, which allows foreigners to live in America if they invest a minimum of $500,000. South Koreans, the next largest group, got only 364 such visas. Canada this year closed down a similar program that had been swamped by Chinese demand.

Some of the wealth sluicing out of China is undoubtedly ill-gotten gains. The Chinese central bank estimates that corrupt officials may have siphoned off as much as $123 billion since the mid-1990s.

Still, he has more to say about "family holidays to destinations such as Kenya, Patagonia and Alaska at $10,000 per head" and how "Chinese are now the third-largest group of nationals landing in Antarctica, where tourists zip around the ice floes in Zodiac inflatables to watch penguins," than about the Naked Officials phenomena which is actually driving real economic dislocation in China-- not to mention another housing bubble America, especially on the West Coast, NYC, and Inside-the-Beltway. Earlier today, also in the Wall Street Journal Esther Fung repotted that (corrupt) Chinese officials are stampeding out of the luxury home market. Ostentation for public officials is supposedly out now.

"Officials are focused on selling their homes quickly, so they are willing to sell at 5% to 10% cheaper than the average prices of comparable homes," says Zhang Yan, a manager at Shanghai Centaline Property Consultants, who says he sells three to four homes to officials every quarter on average. Party members usually find a buyer within two weeks, he said, while most other sellers find buyers in about a month, waiting for a higher price.

…In one case late last year, an Inner Mongolia political leader named Wu Zhizhong was convicted of corruption, accepting bribes and embezzling public funds. Investigators said Mr. Wu owned 33 properties in China and one house in Canada. Xinhua, China's official news agency, said the keys to all of his homes could fill up an entire handbag.

Cai Bin, a former Guangzhou official dubbed "Uncle House" on social media, was also convicted last year for accepting bribes. Investigators said he and his family owned more than 20 homes.

Those cases, and others like them, have raised alarm bells among local government leaders.

…And it comes at a bad time for China's property market, which is facing a slump that many economists say poses the greatest risk to the country's economy. Housing sales in the first seven months this year fell 10.5%, according to official data issued last week.

According to real-estate agents, government officials make up as much as 20% of owners in the luxury housing market, and the agents say they simply aren't buying much anymore.

"A major way to corrupt an official is to give him a house as a gift," says Yan Jirong, a professor at the Peking University School of Government. "The anticorruption campaign is sending a signal" that such tactics should be stopped, he said.

Housing corruption is rampant in China. In June, the authorities in Guangxi Autonomous Region issued a statement warning civil servants "in possession of excess homes" to turn them in, though it left vague where and how to surrender such property.

…In a study from the University of Pennsylvania, economists found that Chinese government officials buy larger and more lavish homes than nonbureaucrats, despite earning typically 14% less in monthly income. Some officials also receive a price discount of nearly 4%, according to the study, which said that the size of the discount appears related to the power the official wields among local developers.

Bureaucrats in the study accounted for 7.1% of buyers-- a much higher percentage compared with the 0.86% proportion of bureaucrats in China's total population.

Many officials mask their homeownership by using the IDs of their chauffeurs, relatives or surrogate buyers, according to real-estate agents.

China, The Red Rockers And Willard Romney

The video above was the first commercial hit my independent record label, 415 Records, ever had. It was our first #1 on any radio chart. The first Republican governor of Louisiana since Reconstruction was so excited by the success of a white band from his state that he made me an honorary colonel in the Louisiana State Police. Little did I know that the Red Rockers, once called the American Clash, could have been addressing today's Republican Party.

Because the most corporately oriented Supreme Court in American history granted the one percent-- what Teddy Roosevelt referred to as "the malefactors of great wealth"-- an absurd, manufactured "right" to nearly unfettered ability to buy the political class for its own purposes (and in complete secret), they also granted foreign governments the ability to buy politicians just about as easily. China immediately took them up on the opportunity, purchasing three senators, Ron Johnson (R-WI), Miss McConnell (R-KY) and Pat Toomey (R-PA), outright and guaranteeing John Boehner the House speakership, with undetectable contributions through the fascist front group the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Now Republican politicians have to deal with it-- having their cake and eating it too, demagoguing against China for xenophobic GOP voters while keeping the Chinese cash flowing in their direction. This week what amounted to a virtual anti-China rally at a Mitt Romney fundraiser was a perfect example, especially when the host, a notorious outsourcer of American jobs, admitted Romney was just playing GOP voters for fools when he faked some outrage at China.

The small businessman who hosted and supports Mitt Romney here-- and makes a healthy portion of his living outsourcing manufacturing work to China-- has a message for his fellow businessfolk: Don’t worry, Romney’s tough talk on China is just that. Talk.

At his final rally of the penultimate day before the caucuses kick off here, Romney blasted China, as he has many, many times on the trail.

“I’ll clamp down on China that’s been cheating,” Romney said. “They’ve been stealing our intellectual property, our designs, our patents, our know-how, our brands, they’ve been hacking into our computers. That has got to stop.”

“I will stop it if I’m President of the United States,” Romney said.

This kind of stuff is a fixture of the Romney campaign stump speech. And it’s given his opponents pause. Jon Huntsman has said Romney’s promise to “brand China a currency manipulator” is dangerous talk that could lead to a costly trade war.

Romney’s Clive remarks came in the manufacturing center of Competitive Edge, an Iowa firm that makes branded items for promotional campaigns. Much of their work is done in China, as the company’s website points out, and owner David Greenspon told me after Romney’s speech that, though he is a supporter of Romney and plans to vote for him, he shares Huntsman’s take on Romney’s China rhetoric.

“You don’t push China. If you push China you’ve got a problem,” he said, adding, “Huntsman is right about China.”

This is not to say that Greenspon doesn’t have a beef with China. He agrees with Romney that the country is unfair in its trading practices and explained to me that though “I’m part of the problem” when it comes to companies sending work to China, he’s working hard to lessen his reliance on the country.

He also said he doesn’t think Romney’s being completely serious when it comes to his tough China talk.

“I think the rhetoric of a campaign is different than the actual application,” he said. “[Romney] will sit down and he will get the right people in, he will take the advice of maybe a Huntsman who will say, ‘this is how to handle China.’”