Brooke Rollins, Trump's Secretary of Agriculture, says Trump is America's third revolution

 No amount of revolution is ever enough for the odious Uniparty. 

Trump's women are the craziest women, the bosom pals of tyrants since at least Aristotle. 

 

The Detroit News: Harvest of hand-picked crops in Michigan in immediate peril due to Trump deportation program, prices set to rocket higher

 Editorial: Trump must act quickly to avert a harvest crisis

The immigration crisis at the southern border has been replaced by one in America's orchards and farm fields.

With harvest season about to begin in earnest, farmers are desperate for laborers to pick their fruit and vegetables. Already in the Pacific Northwest, much of the cherry crop was left to rot because of the shortage of agricultural workers.

The crisis will soon roll into Michigan, where apples, cherries, blueberries, asparagus and other crops are rapidly ripening. Hand-picked specialty crops are a $6.3 billion industry in Michigan, supporting 41,000 jobs.

The shortage of farm workers has been building for years, due to an aging agricultural workforce, competition from more lucrative and less grueling jobs and restrictions on immigrant labor.

This year, it is exacerbated by the Trump administration's crackdown on unauthorized immigrants and the deportation of those who have entered the country illegally.

Estimates are that 42% of farm workers are undocumented migrants. Recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on farms employing migrants have frightened away many of those workers from the fields where they had been working.

But the work they do hasn't gone away. Fruit and vegetables still need to be harvested. If they're not, it will lead to food waste, shortages and higher prices on the grocery shelves.

When asked about the worker shortage, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the solution lies in greater mechanization of farms and matching the 34 million able bodied Americans who must find jobs or lose their Medicaid benefits with farmers who need workers.

While Rollins is correct that those who can work should be expected to, it's doubtful even the risk of losing health care benefits will coax the jobless into hot, backbreaking farm work.

Her solutions will take time and large capital investments. They won't save this year's harvest.

The Trump administration must take emergency action to assure there are enough workers to bring in the crops this summer and fall.

Rather than deporting migrants willing to fill essential jobs such as harvesting, the administration should grant them seasonal visas and a no-deportation guarantee as long as they are working on farms.

Beyond that, reform is needed for the H-2A visa program that allows farmers to legally employ temporary workers from another country. The application process is too complex and time-consuming. It must be simplified; farmers need help now.

Also at issue is the federal mandatory minimum wage for H-2A visa holders, now set at $18.50 an hour. That's nearly $8 an hour higher than the state minimum wage in Michigan. When added to housing and other costs for these workers, many farmers have to limit their use of the visas.

Longer term, resources should be devoted to recruiting domestic workers for the agriculture industry. Farmers are also being encouraged to raise wages for native-born workers, add benefits and improve working conditions.

All of that is expensive and will inevitably show up in grocery prices. But so will the shortages caused by allowing crops to rot in fields.

The most sensible option for this season is to back off deportation of farm workers while solutions are pursued for either replacing them or giving them legal status.

TACO Trump chickens out on more than just tariffs, calls off the ICE raids on agriculture, restaurant, and hotel jobs to quell heartland rebellion

Stephen Miller most hurt.

On Wednesday morning, President Trump took a call from Brooke Rollins, his secretary of agriculture, who relayed a growing sense of alarm from the heartland.

Farmers and agriculture groups, she said, were increasingly uneasy about his immigration crackdown. Federal agents had begun to aggressively target work sites in recent weeks, with the goal of sharply bolstering the number of arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants. ... 

 

Inside the West Wing, top White House officials were caught off guard — and furious at Ms. Rollins. ... 

But the decision had been made. Later on Thursday, a senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Tatum King, sent an email to regional leaders at the agency informing them of new guidance. Agents were to “hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.” ...

More. 

Observe again how quickly Trump is to turn on a dime. The policy changed in less than 48 hours. The last person he talked to can be the most influential, which is not what you want from the leader of the free world. Sometimes he stumbles into the right decision, to be sure, but he can always stumble the wrong way. The tyrant's soul resembles the state which he rules, full of chaos and conflicting desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy.

Permanently higher prices for the basics looks to be the future

 The simple egg is now 25% more expensive at Sam's Club compared with pre-Covid. I used to pay routinely $3.98 for two dozen like those shown below. Prices nationally have fallen only to the unusually high levels of 2015.

Whole chicken is up 23%, electricity 18%, and both appear to be stable or rising.

Avian flu is now only sporadic.

 

Flashback Sunday: Anthony Fauci Feb 17, 2020 said "there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask", danger from coronavirus is "just minuscule"

He couldn't have been more wrong, and on both counts no less.

Coronavirus went on to kill far more than flu ever has since 1918, and other "experts" now chalk up those low flu numbers partly to mask-wearing. 

USA AWAY, here in Feb 2020:

"If you look at the masks that you buy in a drug store, the leakage around that doesn't really do much to protect you," he said. "People start saying, 'Should I start wearing a mask?' Now, in the United States, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask." ...

Fauci doesn't want people to worry about coronavirus, the danger of which is "just minuscule." But he does want them to take precautions against the "influenza outbreak, which is having its second wave."

Coronavirus went on to kill 346,000 in the USA in 2020, but the flu killed just 700 over the entire 2020-2021 season.

The irony is the experts quoted by Scientific American now attribute the low number of flu deaths to mask wearing and social distancing, both of which Fauci only later embraced to stop coronavirus, but which has now gone on to kill an additional 440,000 despite those measures and mass vaccination:

Since the novel coronavirus began its global spread, influenza cases reported to the World Health Organization from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres have dropped to minute levels. The reason, epidemiologists think, is that the public health measures taken to keep the coronavirus from spreading—notably mask wearing and social distancing—also stop the flu.

Prevalence of COVID-19 in 2020 was just 6.1% of population (20m cases in 328m people) because it didn't really hit the country until March. In 2021 to date, prevalence is higher at 8.7% (28.923m cases in 332m people), about the level typical for influenza in an average year.

Why, when people have been masking, social distancing, and getting vaccinated?

Clearly something(s) has(have) stopped influenza, but the definitive transmission mechanism of coronavirus remains unsolved.

Similarly no one so far has explained how white tail deer populations have become riddled with coronavirus: We do not know how the deer were exposed to SARS-CoV-2. 

A new Penn State study is pretty certain hunters are somehow responsible:

“The viral lineages we identified correspond to the same lineages circulating in humans at that time,” said Kapur. “The fact that we found several different SARS-CoV-2 lineages circulating within geographically confined herds across the state suggests the occurrence of multiple independent spillover events from humans to deer, followed by local deer-to-deer transmission. This also raises the possibility of the spillback from deer back to humans, especially in exurban areas with high deer densities.”

But I doubt it's because they breathed on them out there in the woods.

The vectors must be human urine and feces, but to this day no one is focusing on those to explain the continuing crisis.

So why did Trump appoint a Secretary of Agriculture who doesn't support The Wall?

The only other explanation than the one below is that Trump isn't really serious about The Wall and never has been, and is only interested in how he can play the politics of The Wall.

Donald Trump can fund the border wall without congressional approval:

Opposition to the wall within Trump’s own administration has prevented progress on this issue, which is wildly popular with the GOP’s conservative base and is the consequence of the president surrounding himself with establishment advisers who have worked to thwart his populist agenda from within. For example, after being briefed on the concept of selling USDA commercial paper to pay for border security, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue’s then-Chief of Staff Heidi Green shot down the idea by curtly stating, “The secretary does not want the wall.”

Rush Limbaugh thinks the 46 million on food stamps are the U-3 "counted" unemployed, many of whom actually can and do work

Yesterday, here:

"Today, there are 46 million Americans unemployed, and 94 million not working. Now, these 46 million people, these are the counted unemployed. This is the U-3 number. The counted unemployed represent 14% of the population."

Limbaugh somehow gets this convoluted mess from here, which he cites but which clearly states the 46 million are those on food stamps, not the U-3 "counted" unemployed:

"The reason you don’t see huge lines of people waiting in soup lines during this Greater Depression is because the government has figured out how to disguise suffering through modern technology. During the height of the Great Depression in 1933, there were 12.8 million Americans unemployed. These were the men pictured in the soup lines. Today, there are 46 million Americans in an electronic soup kitchen line, as their food is distributed through EBT cards (with that angel of mercy JP Morgan reaping billions in profits by processing the transactions). These 46 million people represent 14% of the U.S. population." 

In the latest Employment Situation Summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for September, those actually counted as unemployed are listed at 7.915 million (2.5% of the population) and the not counted as unemployed at 1.9 million:

"In September, the unemployment rate held at 5.1 percent, and the number of unemployed persons (7.9 million) changed little. Over the year, the unemployment rate and the number of unemployed persons were down by 0.8 percentage point and 1.3 million, respectively. (See table A-1.) . . . In September, 1.9 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, down by 305,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. (See table A-16.)"

U-3 is not a number in millions as Limbaugh says but a rate, the percentage of the labor force which is unemployed (7.915 million / 156.715 million), namely 5.1%.

Limbaugh doesn't understand that lots of employed people get food stamps. Individuals grossing up to $15,312 annually can still qualify for assistance.

Almost 49 million individuals made up to but not more than $15,000 annually in 2014.

The unemployed in Sept. 2015 numbered 7.9 million

U-3 is a percentage

Food Stamp Recipients In June Edged Up Again To Near Record Level

The number of people receiving food assistance edged up again in June to 47,760,285, just shy of the record in December 2012 which was 47,792,056.

The reports may be viewed here.

Data is through September 6th.

15.18% of America's population of 314.69 million receives government food assistance, or 1 in 6.6 individuals, each receiving less than $133 per month or $1.47 per meal.

Rush Limbaugh Finds A GDP Conspiracy Where There Is None

When it comes to numbers, I have observed that Rush Limbaugh can be counted on to get something horribly wrong, and today was no exception. Today he has misrepresented the routine revision of the GDP data every five years as a revision of the numbers for only the last five years, as if it were designed specifically to make Obama look better. In actual fact, the revision of the numbers goes back not five years, but all the way back to 1929.

Truly incredible, and embarrassing in the extreme, since the truth is the revision occurs every five years, and this is the 14th revision in the series. This is why conservatives hope Rush retires soon, nevermind why liberals hope he retires. He's making us all look stupid when he carries on like this.

I have shown "five" in red below from today's Rush transcript so you can appreciate the thorough-going depth of Rush's misrepresentation of the facts: 

RUSH:  Here's what the Commerce Department is doing. 

They have "made changes to how it calculates gross domestic product," going back five years. "At the same time, the government also went back and revised data for the past five years, to reflect more complete as well as additional statistics from a variety of sources, such as the Internal Revenue Service and the US Department of Agriculture." They have made changes to how they're calculating the gross domestic product, or economic growth, and what they're doing now is they're going back five years. 

They have revised data for the past five years to, they say, "reflect a more complete, as well as additional statistics from a variety of sources, such as the IRS and the Department of Agriculture.  Why do you think they decided to go back the last five years to revise data?  To rewrite the horrible 4-1/2 years of Obama.  There's no question.  I don't know if it's fraudulent, but they're cooking the books -- and after cooking the books, after making it look as good as they can, it's 1.7% economic growth.

Here, however, is the statement from the BEA in today's official release about the routine revision every five years, which has been telegraphed to every reader of BEA GDP reports for many quarters running going back at least to last year (meaning Rush Limbaugh has never read even cursorily a single one of those GDP reports from the BEA in the interim, let alone today's):

Today, BEA released revised statistics of gross domestic product (GDP) and of other national income and product accounts (NIPAs) series from 1929 through the first quarter of 2013. Comprehensive revisions, which are carried out about every 5 years, are an important part of BEA's regular process for improving and modernizing its accounts to keep pace with the ever-changing U.S. economy.

-----------------------------------

1.7% GDP in Q2 2013 is horrible enough, but the average report for the last three quarters comes in under 1%, 0.966% to be exact. So if there is some conspiracy to make things look better than they are, whoever's in charge of that ought to be fired, stat!

This country remains in deep trouble, and there is no conspiracy to hide it. 

Food Stamp Households Up, Not Persons, Can Only Mean One Thing

Smaller households.

Food stamp recipient numbers surged up again in March 2013 to 47.727 million Americans, but this did not break the record as claimed by Drudge and Zero Hedge headlines.

The record was reached in December 2012 at 47.792 million.

Zero Hedge is making the claim based on the number of households, not the number of persons. The only thing the former statistic might prove is that as the country becomes more single it becomes more poor. Marriage and family is the economic engine of capitalism, and Obama aims to destroy them both. He's succeeding, which is why Rush Limbaugh famously hoped Obama would fail.

Persons on SNAP have been at the 47 million level since August 2012.

Data here.

Food Stamps In September Hit New Record 47.7 Million Americans

Hm. There's that number "47" again.

Data here.

The Cost of Food Stamps? $75 Billion. 'Disability' Dwarfs That: $200 Billion Annually.

So says this story from The New York Post:

As of January, the federal government was mailing out disability checks to more than 10.5 million individuals, including 2 million to spouses and children of disabled workers, at a cost of record $200 billion a year, recent research from JPMorgan Chase shows.

The sputtering economy has fueled those ranks. Around 5.3 percent of the population between the ages of 25 and 64 is currently collecting federal disability payments, a jump from 4.5 percent since the economy slid into a recession.

Mental-illness claims, in particular, are surging.

During the recent economic boom, only 33 percent of applicants were claiming mental illness, but that figure has jumped to 43 percent, says Rutledge, citing preliminary results from his latest research.


The annual cost of the food stamp program is detailed here annually going back to 1969.

Liberal George Bush Dramatically Expanded Food Stamps, But Obama Out-Liberaled Him

From an excellent summary of the food stamp facts since 1969 in The Wall Street Journal, here:

George W. Bush expanded food stamp eligibility with the egregious 2002 farm bill by adjusting deductions and income tests and encouraging states to find more participants. The Pelosi Congress then rebranded the program in the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of June 2008 to emphasize nutrition rather than the stigma of receiving handouts. As a result and also thanks to the recession in 2008, food stamp participation rose by 10.9 million across the Bush Presidency.

But Mr. Obama is now outstripping that dubious achievement, and in only three years rather than eight. The 2009 stimulus bill increased maximum benefits and authorized more money for states to administer the program. Some 11.2 million more people have joined the rolls from 2009 through 2011, including 4.4 million last year during what was ostensibly an economic recovery.

46.2 million Americans get food stamps according to the latest data here. Fewer than 5 million received them in 1969.

Ohio Repudiates ObamaCare Nov. 8th, Nov. 15th Obama Punishes Ohio by Stopping Gas Leases

'change we much'

As pointed out by an astute caller to Larry Kudlow's radio program today on WABC.

The Nov. 15 announcement by the USDA here means tens of thousands of jobs lost to Ohio and the loss of cheap natural gas for the country, according to this analysis by The Heritage Foundation.

On Nov. 8 Ohioans resoundingly rejected ObamaCare's mandate that Americans buy health insurance by a 2 to 1 margin, stating “In Ohio, no law or rule shall compel, directly or indirectly, any person, employer, or health care provider to participate in a health care system.”