Tuesday, August 12, 2025
Trump nominates Heritage Project 2025 economist to BLS, the very guy who had openly called for the firing of Erika McEntarfer at BLS after the disastrous July jobs numbers came out
If you thought the jobs numbers were unbelievable before, just wait.
... Antoni is the chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation and has been a longtime critic of the BLS. ...
Remember when Trump said he knew nothing about Project 2025?
Yeah, that was a good one.
Monday, August 11, 2025
The Wall Street Journal's Greg Ip observes America under Trump becoming more like China under Xi
Greg Ip
Recent examples include President Trump’s demand that Intel’s chief executive resign; the 15% of certain chip sales to China that Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices will share with Washington; the “golden share” Washington will get in U.S. Steel as a condition of Nippon Steel’s takeover; and the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners Trump plans to personally direct.
This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.
China calls its hybrid “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The U.S. hasn’t gone as far as China or even milder practitioners of state capitalism such as Russia, Brazil and, at times, France. So call this variant “state capitalism with American characteristics.” It is still a sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.
We wouldn’t be dabbling with state capitalism if not for the public’s and both parties’ belief that free-market capitalism wasn’t working. That system encouraged profit-maximizing CEOs to move production abroad. The result was a shrunken manufacturing workforce, dependence on China for vital products such as critical minerals, and underinvestment in the industries of the future such as clean energy and semiconductors.
The federal government has often waded into the corporate world. It commandeered production during World War II and, under the Defense Production Act, emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. It bailed out banks and car companies during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Those, however, were temporary expedients.
Former President Joe Biden went further, seeking to shape the actual structure of industry. His Inflation Reduction Act authorized $400 billion in clean-energy loans. The Chips and Science Act earmarked $39 billion in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Of that, $8.5 billion went to Intel, giving Trump leverage to demand the removal of its CEO over past ties to China. (Intel so far has refused.)
Biden overrode U.S. Steel’s management and shareholders to block Nippon Steel’s takeover, though his staff saw no national-security risk. Trump reversed that veto while extracting the “golden share” that he can use to influence the company’s decisions. In design and name it mimics the golden shares that private Chinese companies must issue to the CCP.
Biden officials had mulled a sovereign-wealth fund to finance strategically important but commercially risky projects such as in critical minerals, which China dominates. Last month, Trump’s Department of Defense said it would take a 15% stake in MP Materials, a miner of critical minerals.
Many in the West admire China for its ability to turbocharge growth through massive feats of infrastructure building, scientific advance and promotion of favored industries. American efforts are often bogged down amid the checks, balances and compromises of pluralistic democracy.
In his forthcoming book, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” author Dan Wang writes: “China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”
To admirers, Trump’s appeal is his willingness to bulldoze those lawyerly obstacles. He has imposed tariffs on an array of countries and sectors, seizing authority that is supposed to belong to Congress. He extracted $1.5 trillion in investment pledges from Japan, the European Union and South Korea that he claims he will personally direct, though no legal mechanism for doing so appears to exist. (Those pledges are already in dispute.)
There are reasons state capitalism never caught on before. The state can’t allocate capital more efficiently than private markets. Distortions, waste and cronyism typically follow. Russia, Brazil and France have grown much more slowly than the U.S.
Chinese state capitalism isn’t the success story it seems. Barry Naughton of the University of California, San Diego has documented how China’s rapid growth since 1979 has come from market sources, not the state. As Chinese leader Xi Jinping has reimposed state control, growth has slowed. China is awash with savings, but the state wastes much of it. From steel to vehicles, excess capacity leads to plummeting prices and profits.
The U.S. hasn’t fared any better. Interventions made in the name of national security or kick-starting infant industries lead to boondoggles like Foxconn’s promised factory in Wisconsin or Tesla’s solar-panel factory in Buffalo, N.Y.
State capitalism is an all-of-society affair in China, directed from Beijing via millions of cadres in local governments and company boardrooms. In the U.S., it consists largely of Oval Office announcements lacking any policy or institutional framework. “The core characteristic of China’s state capitalism is discipline, and Trump is the complete opposite of that,” Wang said in an interview.
State capitalism is a means of political, not just economic, control. Xi ruthlessly deploys economic levers to crush any challenge to party primacy. In 2020, Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, arguably the country’s most famous business leader, criticized Chinese regulators for stifling financial innovation. Retaliation was swift. Regulators canceled the initial public offering of Ma’s financial company, Ant Group, and eventually fined it $2.8 billion for anticompetitive behavior. Ma briefly disappeared from public view.
Trump has similarly deployed executive orders and regulatory powers against media companies, banks, law firms and other companies he believes oppose him, while rewarding executives who align themselves with his priorities.
In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade. Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.
Trump is also seeking political control over agencies that have long operated at arm’s length from the White House, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve. That, too, has echoes of China where the bureaucracy is fully subordinate to the ruling party.
Trump has long admired the control Xi exercises over his country, but there are, in theory, limits to how far he can emulate him.
American democracy constrains the state through an independent judiciary, free speech, due process and the diffusion of power among multiple levels and branches of government. How far state capitalism ultimately displaces free-market capitalism in the U.S. depends on how well those checks and balances hold up.
Trump invokes emergency powers yet again, takes over DC police for 30 days under Home Rule Act over non-existent crime surge except against his own people, deploys National Guard
This is pissing-match security theatre: "If Biden can do it so can I".
... his emergency control is set to expire after a maximum of 30 days,
according to the statute. That can be extended, but only if Congress
passes a law authorizing it.
While Trump has frequently complained about crime in the district, violent crime there has fallen to a 30-year low as of January, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. ...
Sunday, August 10, 2025
Andrew Sullivan makes Trump subhuman the way Mark Levin and Michael Savage have made their enemies subhuman, says the American people no longer want to govern themselves
They shoot wild boar in Texas from helicopters, don't they?
... Trump is conservatism’s actual nemesis: a wild boar — psychologically incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy.
This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit. ...
I recall that when I first wrote that I didn’t believe Trump would concede an election he lost, and thereby provoke a constitutional crisis, I was also told I was hyperventilating. But it happened. And Americans rewarded it four years later by re-electing the man who tried to destroy their democracy. That’s exactly as the ancient political philosophers predicted: as democracies enter their late, chaotic stage, the people want an autocrat. They yearn for one. And in America, they voted for one twice. The forces we are up against are far beyond Trump. They’re called the cycles of history and a critical mass of the American people, who no longer want to govern themselves, who are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise. ...
Andrew Sullivan intimately knows all about not governing oneself. If only the Democrats did, who relentlessly persecuted and prosecuted Trump while in office and out. That's why we are here.
Power hungry data centers break the utility model of socializing electricity costs: Seventy percent of last year's increased electricity cost was the result of data center demand
As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act
... Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog for the mid-Atlantic grid, produced research in June showing that 70% — or $9.3 billion — of last year’s increased electricity cost was the result of data center demand. ...
PJM [Interconnection, the mid-Atlantic grid operator], has yet to propose ways to guarantee that data centers pay their freight, but Monitoring Analytics is floating the idea that data centers should be required to procure their own power.
In a filing last month, it said that would avoid a “massive wealth transfer” from average people to tech companies. ...
The quantity of electricity generated in the US by all sources, from natural gas to rooftop solar, rose by 3.1% in 2024 from 2023 to a record of 4,304,039 gigawatt-hours (GWh), according to data from the EIA today.
This is now clearly a breakout in demand, after 14 years of stagnation, from 2007 through 2021, when electricity users, to reduce their costs, invested in more efficient equipment – lights, appliances, electronic equipment, industrial equipment, heating and air-conditioning, etc. – and in better building insulation, shading, etc., to reduce their power costs. This relentless drive for greater efficiency kept demand roughly stable for years despite the growing economy and population. And it mired many power generators and electric utilities in a no-growth business where it was difficult to justify investment.
Now the scenario has changed, largely due to the growth in demand from data centers (AI, cloud, crypto) and the increasing penetration of EVs in the national vehicle fleet – EVs accounted for over 10% of US vehicle sales in 2024. ...
Republican Ralph Norman (SC-5), who wants to be South Carolina's next governor, says higher prices due to Trump's tariffs are for the good of the country
You be happy paying more.
... Notably, Norman was one of the few House lawmakers not to endorse Trump in 2024, backing former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley instead.
In his late July announcement of his upcoming gubernatorial bid, however, he praised Trump, predicting “what he did [in Iran] is going to put him in the annals of the greatest presidents we have ever had.” ...
More.
There are already five Republicans running for governor in South Carolina.
Saturday, August 9, 2025
The market cap of all silver estimated to have been mined through 2019 is up about 70 percent in the last eighteen months
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| early February 2024 |
 |
| early August 2025 |
The market cap of all above ground gold reserves as of the end of 2021 is up about 69 percent in the last eighteen months
 |
| early February 2024 |
 |
| early August 2025 |
The failure of Santa Anna National Bank of Santa Anna Texas on June 27 will cost the Deposit Insurance Fund $23.7 million even though the mismatch between assets and deposits was only $10 million
😒
... Suspected fraud contributed to the failure of the bank and estimated cost to the DIF. ...
More.
Zelenskyy again says Nyet lol
Like everyone expected, except for Donald Trump, who has never been to Realville.
... "Ukrainians will not give their land to the occupier.” ...
Meanwhile . . .
Friday, August 8, 2025
Jim Lovell was the greatest of Americans
This is a fabulous tribute to the man who kept his head while all others were losing theirs.
Apollo 13 moon mission leader James Lovell dies at 97
... One of NASA’s most traveled astronauts in the agency’s first decade, Lovell flew four times — Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 — with the two Apollo flights riveting the folks back on Earth.
In 1968, the Apollo 8 crew of Lovell, Frank Borman and William Anders was the first to leave Earth’s orbit and the first to fly to and circle the moon. They could not land, but they put the U.S. ahead of the Soviets in the space race. Letter writers told the crew that their stunning pale blue dot photo of Earth from the moon, a world first, and the crew’s Christmas Eve reading from Genesis saved America from a tumultuous 1968.
But the big rescue mission was still to come. That was during the harrowing Apollo 13 flight in April 1970. Lovell was supposed to be the fifth man to walk on the moon. But Apollo 13′s service module, carrying Lovell and two others, experienced a sudden oxygen tank explosion on its way to the moon. The astronauts barely survived, spending four cold and clammy days in the cramped lunar module as a lifeboat. ...
“I think in the history of space flight, I would say that Jim was one of the pillars of the early space flight program,” Gene Kranz, NASA’s legendary flight director, once said. ...
The Apollo 13 crew of Lovell, Haise and Swigert was on the way to the moon in April 1970, when an oxygen tank from the spaceship exploded 200,000 miles from Earth.
That, Lovell recalled, was “the most frightening moment in this whole thing.” Then oxygen began escaping and “we didn’t have solutions to get home.”
“We knew we were in deep, deep trouble,” he told NASA’s historian.
Four-fifths of the way to the moon, NASA scrapped the mission. Suddenly, their only goal was to survive. ...
EV sales achieve record high 9.1% of total sales of passenger vehicles in July, 90.9% sold still internal combustion lol
EV sales soar as Trump axes $7,500 tax credit: ‘People are rushing out’ to buy, analyst says
Consumers are racing to buy electric vehicles before a fast-approaching deadline to claim tax credits worth up to $7,500, according to auto analysts.
Legislation championed by Republicans on Capitol Hill and signed by President Donald Trump in July eliminates the tax breaks — available for new, used and leased EVs — after Sept. 30.
The Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act had originally offered the tax breaks to consumers through 2032.
“We’re expecting Q3 may be [a] record for EV sales because of the tax incentives going away,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, a senior analyst at Cox Automotive.
“People are rushing out” to buy, she said.
Consumers purchased nearly 130,100 new EVs in July, the second-highest monthly sales tally on record, behind roughly 136,000 sold in December, according to Cox Automotive data. The July figures represent a 26.4% increase from June and nearly 20% increase year-over-year, Streaty said.
The share of EV sales in July also accounted for about 9.1% of total sales of passenger vehicles that month, the largest monthly share on record, according to Cox.
“We’re seeing significant volume in new EVs,” said Liz Najman, director of market insights at Recurrent, an EV marketplace and data provider. ...
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