Category: Policies

Trump attacks US Fed, demands rate cut

President Donald Trump attacked the independent US Federal Reserve on Friday, demanding the central bank reverse course and cut interest rates — something it is widely expected to do this month.

In another Twitter outburst, Trump called on the Fed to “Correct!” its overreach.

“We are in a World competition, & winning big,… but it is no thanks to the Federal Reserve,” he said.

“Had they not acted so fast and ‘so much,’ we would be doing even better than we are doing right now. This is our chance to build unparalleled wealth and success for the U.S., GROWTH… Don’t blow it!”

The US central bank raised the benchmark borrowing rate four times last year but seems almost certain to pull back with the first cut in a decade at its policy meeting July 30-31.

Recent comments from Fed officials seemed to confirm the signal that policymakers are prepared to act to sustain US growth in the face of a slowing global economy and persistent trade tensions with China.

“You don’t need to wait until things get so bad to have a dramatic series of rate cuts,” Fed Vice Chairman Richard Clarida told Fox Business Network on Thursday.

That comment echoed a statement earlier Thursday from John Williams, the influential vice chairman of the Fed’s policy committee, who talked about the need to vaccinate when rates are very low.

[Raw Story]

Reality

The independence of a Federal Reserve is what gives its authority and a stability that is relied upon by companies and countries around the world.

Donald Trump is doing everything he can to undermine the Fed’s independence for short-term political wins.

Trump Attacks Tom ‘The Chin’ Friedman For Calling Him Racist: We Just Spoke and He ‘Kissed My A**’

President Donald Trump unleashed a tirade against Thomas Friedman on Twitter Friday morning, claiming the New York Times columnist had been friendly in a private call before deeming him a racist in print.

Trump kicked off his Twitter meltdown with an unflattering nickname for Friedman:

Thomas “the Chin” Friedman, a weak and pathetic sort of guy, writes columns for The New York Times in between rounds of his favorite game, golf. Two weeks ago, while speaking to a friend on his cell phone, I unfortunately ended up speaking to Friedman … he could not have been nicer or more respectful to your favorite President, me. Then I saw the column he wrote, “Trump Will Be Re-elected, Won’t He?” He called me a Racist, which I am not, and said Rhode Island went from economically bad to great in 5 years because the … Governor of the State did a good job. That may be true but she could not have done it without the tremendous economic success of our Country & the turnaround that my Administration has caused. Really Nasty to me in his average I.Q. Columns, kissed my a.. on the call. Phony!

While it’s difficult to know what transpired on their call — Trump tends to be an unreliable narrator and has claimed many a time that his critics kiss his ass in private — the president is correct about Friedman’s brutal column, which warned Democrats that Trump could win in 2020.

The searing line that likely piqued Trump’s ire: “I wasn’t surprised to hear so many people expressing fear that the racist, divisive, climate-change-denying, woman-abusing jerk who is our president was going to get re-elected, and was even seeing his poll numbers rise.”

[Mediaite]

Trump Twitter-rages over media’s coverage of the racist ‘send her back’ chant he incited

President Donald Trump on Thursday said he did not like the racist “send her back” chant directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) that erupted during his campaign rally this week.

On Friday, however, the president attacked the media for criticizing the chant even as he boasted about the large number of people at the rally who were conducting the racist chant.

“It is amazing how the Fake News Media became ‘crazed’ over the chant ‘send her back’ by a packed Arena (a record) crowd in the Great State of North Carolina, but is totally calm & accepting of the most vile and disgusting statements made by the three Radical Left Congresswomen,” the president wrote. “Mainstream Media, which has lost all credibility, has either officially or unofficially become a part of the Radical Left Democrat Party. It is a sick partnership, so pathetic to watch!”

Trump then bashed the media for covering the adoring crowd that welcomed Omar home when she arrived back in her home state of Minnesota.

“They even covered a tiny staged crowd as they greeted Foul Mouthed Omar in Minnesota, a State which I will win in 2020 because they can’t stand her and her hatred of our Country,” he wrote.

[Raw Story]

Trump’s EPA Just Made Its Final Decision Not to Ban a Pesticide That Hurts Kids’ Brains

On Wednesday, the United States Environmental Protection Agency doubled down on one of the most controversial environmental deregulation moves of the Trump presidency. Under pressure from a looming court-ordered deadline, the EPA reaffirmed its 2017 decision to reject a proposal from the agency’s own scientists to ban an insecticide called chlorpyrifos that farmers use on a wide variety of crops, including corn, soybeans, fruit and nut trees, Brussels sprouts, cranberries, broccoli, and cauliflower. 

Here’s background from my piece in 2017:

The pesticide in question, chlorpyrifos, is a nasty piece of work. It’s an organophosphate, a class of bug killers that work by “interrupting the electrochemical processes that nerves use to communicate with muscles and other nerves,” as the Pesticide Encyclopedia puts it. Chlorpyrifos is also an endocrine disrupter, meaning it can cause “adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune effects,” according to the National Institutes of Health.

Major studies from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the University of California-Davis, and Columbia University have found strong evidence that low doses of chlorpyrifos inhibits kids’ brain development, including when exposure occurs in the womb, with effects ranging from lower IQ to higher rates of autism. Several studies—examples here, here, and here—have found it in the urine of kids who live near treated fields. In 2000, the EPA banned most home uses of the chemical, citing risks to children.

And here’s the dirt on the relationship between President Donald Trump and the company that markets the chemical:

Dow AgroSciences’ parent company, Dow Chemical, has also been buttering up Trump. The company contributed $1 million to the president’s inaugural committee, the Center for Public Integrity notes. In December, Dow Chemical Chairman and CEO Andrew Liveris attended a post-election Trump rally in the company’s home state of Michigan, and used the occasion to announce plans to create 100 new jobs and bring back another 100 more from foreign subsidiaries. Around the same time, Trump named Liveris chair of the American Manufacturing Council, declaring the chemical exec would “find ways to bring industry back to America.” (Dow has another reason beside chlorpyrifos’ fate to get chummy with Trump: its pending mega-merger with erstwhile rival DuPont, which still has to clear Trump’s Department of Justice.)

Since the 2017 chlorpyrifos decision, the administration has approved the Dow-Dupont merger, and named several former Dow execs to high posts within the US Department of Agriculture.

Meanwhile, Hawaii, California, and New York have all announced plans to phase out use of chlorpyrifos in farm fields. 

Here’s information from the US Geological Survey on where chlorpyrifos is used:

pesticide use map

[Mother Jones]

Trump Claims Only Republicans Can Pull Off Preexisting Condition Protections Already Available in Obamacare

Donald Trump told his rally-goers dozens of insane lies, but one lie really stood out, claiming, “The Democrats’ vision on healthcare is deception and disruption … patients with pre-existing conditions are protected by Republicans much more so than were protected by Democrats who can never pull it off.”

One problem. Obamacare, passed by Democrats, contains protections for people with preexisting medical conditions and this is the same law Republicans tried to repeal 70 times and Trump’s own DOJ is currently trying to dismantle in courts today.

Monica Crowley, Fox promoter of bigoted conspiracy theories, named to top Treasury post

Monica Crowley, President Donald Trump’s pick for the top communications position at the Treasury Department, is a longtime Fox News contributor who has pilloried journalists as “dishonest, hostile, biased, rude fake news” and has endorsed a series of racist conspiracy theories, including about President Barack Obama’s “real father.”

Trump intends to nominate Crowley to be assistant secretary of the Treasury for public affairs, the White House announced Monday night. The position does not require Senate confirmation. 

Crowley spent decades in right-wing media — joining Fox in 1998 — after serving as an aide to former President Richard Nixon in the early 1990s. At Fox, she was a C-list voice the network’s hosts regularly booked to provide the casual bigotries, hypocrises, talking points, and lies that fuel the Fox propaganda machine. 

Her appointment is an additional sign of the unprecedented merger between Fox and the Trump White House. She is at least the 17th former Fox employee to join the administration and replaces Tony Sayegh, himself a former Fox contributor. 

Crowley was previously tapped for a top communications job in Trump’s National Security Council shortly after his election. But she declined to take the position after CNN and Politico respectively reported that she had plagiarized portions of her 2012 book and her doctoral dissertation.  

A few months later, she told Fox star Sean Hannity that she had been the victim of “a despicable, straight-up political hit job” and falsely claimed the charges had been “debunked.”

Such attacks on journalism are as much a part of the job description for Trump administration communications staffers as they are for right-wing commentators. Crowley has been an eager combatant in this fight, regularly decrying the “corrupt,” “leftist” media while praising Trump for putting the “dishonest, hostile, biased, rude fake news in its place.”

Crowley’s tenure as a conservative commentator is most notable for her adoption of conspiracy theories about Obama’s heritage during his presidency.

She argued that it was “very legitimate” to question Obama’s birth certificate, argued that such issues “have traction” because of the then-president’s “un-American” policies, and speculated that Obama might not be a “natural-born citizen” eligible for the presidency. 

Crowley also promoted the myths that Obama “is not Black African, he is Arab African” and that he might be a Muslim.

Crowley’s promotion of bigoted conspiracy theories about Obama culminated with her enthusiastic promotionof Dreams from My Real Father, a 2012 documentary by conservative filmmaker Joel Gilbert that alleged that Obama is actually the biological son of the communist writer Frank Marshall Davis. 

Gilbert’s film takes one actual fact — Obama wrote in his memoir that he had been friendly with Davis as a teenager in Hawaii, having been introduced by his grandfather — and uses fake sources and wild speculation to extrapolate that Davis is his “real father.” But mostly, the film’s thesis is based on Gilbert’s opinion that Obama looks more like Davis than he does the elder Barack Obama, and it features several juxtaposed images in which Gilbert circles their supposedly similar features.

Crowley praised the film as “just dynamite” during an interview with Gilbert on her radio show, claiming that he had amassed “some very powerful evidence” and urging listeners to watch the documentary and “judge the story for themselves.”

These are the sorts of people you end up hiring when you’re drawing on the Fox green room for your staff.

[Media Matters]

Kellyanne Conway Snaps Back at Reporter: ‘What’s Your Ethnicity?’

When White House reporter Andrew Feinberg posed a question to Kellyanne Conway on Tuesday about the president’s racist tweets against the four congresswomen known as the “Squad,” he found himself taken aback by her response. 

Feinberg, a reporter for the website BeltwayBreakfast.com, asked the White House counselor which countries President Donald Trump was referring to when he suggested Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar—all U.S. citizens—should “go back” to where they came from. 

Instead of answering that question, Conway asked him, “What’s your ethnicity?” 

“Uh… why is that relevant?” Feinberg asked before Conway interrupted him to say, “Because I’m asking you a question.”

After Conway shares that her ancestors are from Ireland and Italy, the reporter said, “My ethnicity is not relevant to the question I’m asking you.” 

Conway still would not answer Feinberg’s question, instead insisting that he question was relevant because Trump said “originally” from—he didn’t—and going on a rant about how “a lot of us are sick and tired in this country of America coming last,” echoing comments she made on Fox News earlier in the day about the “Squad” representing a “dark underbelly in this country.” 

In that same Fox interview, Conway distanced herself from her husband George Conway, whose latest Washington Post column is headlined: “Trump is a racist president.” 

Reached for comment, Feinberg told The Daily Beast, “It’s not the first time she’s responded to one of my questions with an irrelevant question, but this time was particularly bizarre.”

“I just wanted to get back to what I was asking her about,” he added, “so I was glad she was able to confirm the president’s thinking on the matter.”

[The Daily Beast]

Media

Trump calls for a “treason” investigation based on a Fox & Friends news brief

President Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday morning that his administration would review whether Google has committed “treason” after seeing a Fox & Friends news brief in which one of his biggest Silicon Valley supporters floated that baseless claim.

Trump was responding to a Fox & Friends segment from earlier Tuesday morning, as he indicated by tagging the show’s Twitter handle and using quotes from its programming. An hour earlier, Fox news reader Jillian Mele began a news brief, “Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel believes China should be investigated for treason.” As she spoke, Fox’s chyron read, “Thiel accuses Google of working with Chinese Govt.”

Trump regularly watches Fox News programs like Fox & Friends (often on delay using his “Super Tivo”) and tweets about segments that catch his attention. This creates a feedback loop between the president and his most avid propagandists which can swing both the national news cycle and federal policy. 

Fox segments spur some of the president’s most inflammatory comments — this morning’s tweet marks at least the fourth time the president has responded to the network’s coverage by promoting a treason charge against his perceived enemies.

In this case, Trump was picking up on an accusation from Thiel, a wealthy tech investor and major Trump donor who spoke at the 2016 Republican convention. In a speech on Sunday, Thiel said that Google’s decision to work with the Chinese government to produce a censored version of its search while letting a Pentagon contract lapse was “seemingly treasonous,” and he suggested without evidence that Google’s executive corps had been “infiltrated” by foreign intelligence services. “These questions need to be asked by the FBI and the CIA,” he added. (Thiel sits on the board of Facebook, a Google competitor.)

The Pentagon has previously alleged that Google’s work in China provides a “direct benefit to the Chinese military,” and Trump has echoed the point. The tech company responded that it is not working with the Chinese military. 

Thiel returned to the subject during a Monday night appearance on Fox News host and sometime Trump adviser Tucker Carlson’s show, floating what he described as “a few different possibilities” while offering no evidence for his claim of Chinese infiltration of and treason by Google. 

“If [Google CEO] Sundar Pinchai was sitting right here, what would you say to him?” Carlson asked at one point.

“Well, I would say, answer my three questions,” Thiel replied. “How many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated Google? Have the Chinese in particular infiltrated? And why are you working with Communist China and not the U.S.? What is the reason you’re doing that?”

“The questions you raise, and this is not in any way to minimize their importance, are kind of obvious questions,” Carlson replied. “Why hasn’t the U.S. government ascertained the answers?”

“It’s possible that there are people in the U.S. government looking into it and they haven’t told us, but yeah, I think the FBI and CIA would be the natural places to look into it,” Thiel said.

Mele aired a clip from that interview during her news brief the following morning. 

Fox’s credulous coverage of Thiel’s speculation — and Trump’s parroting of those claims — is no surprise. Right-wing activists and journalists have treated tech companies as an emerging enemy force in recent years. By inflating claims of purported bias against conservatives on social media platforms, they sought to redeploy ref-working tactics previously used against news media outlets. 

Fueled by Fox, Trump has adopted this campaign as his own. Last year, Trump claimed Google’s search engine was “suppressing voices of Conservatives” and promised to act against it, apparently in response to a conspiracy-minded segment he saw on Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs Tonight. 

Last week, Trump took that accusation from Twitter to the White House Rose Garden. “We had a terrible bias,” Trump said at Thursday’s “Presidential Social Media Summit,” an event that sought to mainstream previously fringe pro-Trump figures. “We have censorship like nobody has any understanding or nobody can believe.” 

[Media Matters]

Trump Attacks Congresswomen in Unhinged Presser: ‘They Hate Our Country’ With a Passion, ‘They Hate Jews’

In his first public comments since he leveled attacks on Democratic congresswomen that many saw as racist, President Donald Trump defended his tweets in a press conference on the south lawn of the White House.

Trump took questions in a contentious back-and-forth from the press and continued to hit Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) for “hating Israel” and three other freshman congresswomen, namely Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rep. Rashida Tlaiband Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the last of which he blamed for Amazon not building a East Coast headquarters in Queens, New York.

“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” Trump wrote of the congresswomen in a Twitter thread Sunday morning.

“They are very unhappy,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “I’m watching them, all they do is complain. All I’m saying, if they want to leave, they can leave.”

He then turned his focus of derision on Rep. Omar, referring to her as “somebody that comes from Somalia.” He continued that Omar is “never happy, says horrible things about Israel, hates Israel, hates Jews.”

“I look at the one, I look at Omar,” Trump said. “I don’t know, I never met her. I hear the way she talks about Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda has killed many Americans.”

He finished, “They can leave, and you know what? I’m sure there will be many people that want to miss them.”

Trump spoke at length, ultimately claiming that these four congresswomen, “hate our country … with a passion” before oddly lamenting how the “Democrat party” would be making a big political mistake by getting behind these four individuals.

[Mediaite]

Reality

Trump lied about Omar’s Al Qaeda comments.

Trump says he’s not concerned about being racist because “many people agree” with him

President Donald Trump said on Monday that he’s not concerned about coming across as racist in tweets he posted on Sunday admonishing Democratic women of color in Congress to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” because many people agree with him. No, really.

While Trump was taking questions from reporters during an event that was ostensibly supposed to be a “Made in America Product Showcase,” Fox News reporter John Roberts asked him if it concerns him that “many people saw that tweet as racist and that white nationalist groups are finding common cause with you on that point?”

Trump said that he is not, in fact, worried about it.

“It doesn’t concern me because many people agree with me,” he said. “And all I’m saying — they want to leave, they can leave. Now, it doesn’t say, ‘Leave forever.’ It says, ‘Leave if you want.’”

Trump quickly pivoted to talking about the stock market hitting all-time highs — as though the existence of a relatively strong economy stands on its own as a refutation of anyone who would criticize the American government. His comments were applauded.

Watch:

Trump also escalated his attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) — who, along with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), is one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress — by baselessly accusing her of being an al-Qaeda sympathizer.

“I mean, I look at the one, I look at Omar — I don’t know, I never met her — I hear the way she talks about al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda has killed many Americans. She said, ‘You can hold your chest out. When I think of America — uhh. When I think of al-Qaeda, I can hold my chest out,’” Trump said. “These are people that in my opinion hate our country … they can leave … they have to love our country.”

Trump went on to accuse Omar of “speaking about how wonderful al-Qaeda is” and said she “hates Jews.”

Trump’s latest attack on Omar represents a grotesque distortion of what she said during a 2013 interview with a public television station. Referring to her experiences as a college student Omar said, “When I was in college, I took a terrorism class … every time the professor said ‘al-Qaeda,’ his shoulders went up. … But you know … you don’t say ‘America’ with an intensity, you don’t say ‘England’ with the intensity. You don’t say ‘the army’ with the intensity … But you say these names [of terrorist groups] because you want that word to carry weight. You want it to be something.”

At no point did Omar say anything even close to praising al-Qaeda. And while she has criticized Israel in a manner that some thought invoked anti-Semitic tropes, Trump’s claim that she “hates Jews” is also a dangerous exaggeration. (Omar was inundated with death threatsearlier this year after Trump posted a video suggesting she sympathized with 9/11 attackers.)

In short, the president isn’t concerned about being racist because other people out there are racist too. He also doesn’t seem particularly concerned about the safety of a duly elected Congress member, given that his obscene lies about her are likely to result in her receiving threats.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party — which holds a majority in the Senate and thus has the power to prevent Trump from being removed from office — barely seems capable at this point of criticizing the president’s explicit bigotry. Such is the state of play in American politics.

[Vox]

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