monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

You were saying Israel should annex the West Bank.

Israel is a new country made of immigrants.

A supporter of US President Donald Trump has attacked a BBC cameraman at a campaign rally in El Paso, Texas.

Sporting a Make America Great Again cap, the man shoved and swore at the BBC's Ron Skeans and other news crews before being pulled away.

Mr Skeans said the "very hard shove" came from his blindside. "I didn't know what was going on."

Mr Trump saw the attack and confirmed Mr Skeans was well with a thumbs up after it happened.

The president has had a fractious relationship with the media from the very start of his time in office.

He has claimed journalists are "the enemy of the people" and slammed the "fake news" for reports he deems unfavourable.

Mr Skeans said the man almost knocked him and his camera over twice before he was wrestled away by a blogger.

President Trump checked they were well with a thumbs up, and continued his speech after Mr Skeans returned the gesture.

BBC Washington producer Eleanor Montague and Washington correspondent Gary O'Donoghue were sitting in front of the camera.

Ms Montague said the protester had attacked other news crews but Mr Skeans "got the brunt of it".

A campaign official for Mr Trump afterwards suggested the attacker was drunk.

The president went to El Paso, on the US border with Mexico, to campaign for a border wall, a divisive issue which caused the longest government shutdown in US history.

Ms Montague said the president had spoken of "fake news" and how the media misrepresented him in the run up to the assault.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Mr O'Donoghue said it was "an incredibly violent attack".

"This is a constant feature of these rallies - a goading of the crowds against the media," Mr O'Donoghue said, who added that he had been "spat at before".

Last August UN experts warned Mr Trump's attacks "increase the risk of journalists being targeted with violence", calling his rhetoric "strategic".

New York Times publisher AG Sulzberger has urged the president to stop his media assaults.

CNN meanwhile filmed supporters of Mr Trump yelling abuse and swearing at reporters covering a rally in Florida last year.

Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci condemned Trump's supporters at the Florida rally on Twitter, saying the behaviour was "not who we are".

Robert Reich: Trump offers socialism for the rich, capitalism for everyone else

America will never be a socialist country,” Donald Trump declared in his State of the Union address. Someone should alert Trump that America is now a hotbed of socialism. But it is socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.

In the conservative mind, socialism means getting something for doing nothing. That pretty much describes the $21bn saved by the nation’s largest banks last year thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, some of which went into massive bonuses for bank executives. On the other hand, more than 4,000 lower-level bank employees got a big dose of harsh capitalism. They lost their jobs.

Banks that are too big to fail – courtesy of the 2008 bank bailout – enjoy a hidden subsidy of some $83bn a year, because creditors facing less risk accept lower interest on deposits and loans. Last year, Wall Street’s bonus pool was $31.4bn. Take away the hidden subsidy and the bonus pool disappears.

Trump and his appointees at the Federal Reserve are easing bank requirements put in place after the bailout. They’ll make sure the biggest banks remain too big to fail.

Trump is promoting socialism for the rich and harsh capitalism for everyone else in other ways. GM has got more than $600m in federal contracts, plus $500m in tax breaks. Some of this has gone into the pockets of GM executives. Chairman and CEO Mary Barra raked in almost $22m in total compensation in 2017 alone.

But GM employees are subject to harsh capitalism. GM is planning to lay off more than 14,000 workers and close three assembly plants and two component factories in North America by the end of 2019.

When he was in business, Trump perfected the art of using bankruptcy to shield himself from the consequences of bad decisions – socialism for the rich at its worst – while leaving employees twisting in the wind.

Now, all over America, executives who run their companies into the ground are getting gold-plated exit packages while their workers get pink slips.

Sears is doling out $25m to the executives who stripped its remaining assets and drove it into bankruptcy, but has no money for the thousands of workers it laid off.

As Pacific Gas and Electric hurdles toward bankruptcy, the person who was in charge when the deadly infernos roared through Northern California last year (caused in part by PG&E’s faulty equipment) has departed with a cash severance package of $2.5m . The PG&E executive in charge of gas operations when records were allegedly falsified left in 2017 with $6.9m.

Under socialism for the rich, you can screw up big time and still reap big rewards. Equifax’s Richard Smith retired in 2017 with an $18m pension in the wake of a security breach that exposed the personal information of 145 million consumers to hackers.

Wells Fargo’s Carrie Tolstedt departed with a $125m exit package after being in charge of the unit that opened more than 2 million unauthorized customer accounts.

Around 60% of America’s wealth is now inherited. Many of today’s super-rich have never done a day’s work in their lives.

Trump’s response has been to cut the estate tax to apply only to estates valued at over $22m per couple. Mitch McConnell is now proposing that the estate tax be repealed altogether.

What about the capitalist principles that people earn what they’re worth in the market, and that economic gains should go to those who deserve them?
America is on the cusp of the largest inter-generational wealth transfer in history. As rich boomers expire over the next three decades, an estimated $30tn will go to their children.

Those children will be able to live off of the income these assets generate, and then leave the bulk of them to their own heirs, tax-free. (Capital gains taxes don’t apply to the soaring values of stocks, bonds, mansions, and other assets of wealthy people who die before they’re sold.)

After a few generations of this, almost all of the nation’s wealth will be in the hands of a few thousand non-working families. To the conservative mind, the specter of socialism conjures up a society in which no one is held accountable, and no one has to work for what they receive. Yet that’s exactly the society Trump and the Republicans are promoting for the rich.

Meanwhile, most Americans are subject to an increasingly harsh and arbitrary capitalism in which they’re working harder but getting nowhere, and have less security than ever.

They need thicker safety nets and deserve a bigger piece of the economic pie. If you want to call this socialism, fine. I call it fair.

Farmers nearing crisis push back on Trump trade policies


President Donald Trump’s trade war is magnifying some of the toughest farm conditions since the crisis that bankrupted thousands of farmers in the 1980s — and threatening a constituency crucial to his reelection hopes.

The president’s trade policies have sent U.S. agricultural exports plunging, exacerbating already difficult economic conditions facing farmers. Average farm income has fallen to near 15-year lows under Trump, and in some areas of the country, farm bankruptcies are soaring.

The fate of the farm economy and rural America is fused to Trump’s political future. Farmers and ranchers make up the heart of his base, and their support in battleground Midwestern states like Iowa and Wisconsin could help determine the 2020 presidential election. Although Trump’s standing with those groups generally remains strong, cracks are starting to show.

During his speech on Monday night Trump exaggerated the number of people attending the event, something his administration also did after his inauguration ceremony.

Trump told the crowds inside El Paso County Coliseum that 69,000 people had signed up to attend. “The arena holds 8,000 and, thank you fire department, they got in about 10 [thousand],” he said. “But if you really want to see something, go outside. Tens of thousands of people are watching screens outside.”

According to reports, a spokesman for El Paso fire department said the president’s claim was incorrect, and that only 6,500 people were allowed inside – the building’s capacity.

[...]
El Paso was never one of the most dangerous cities in the country. It has had a consistently lower crime rate than the average among more than 20 similarly sized cities, according to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In that group, El Paso reported the second-lowest violent crime rate in 2008 — before the construction of border fencing. And after the barrier was completed, it held the rank while the violent crime rate did not change considerably.
[...]

You're saying that he's not a liar, just stupid?

Robert Reich:

I have no doubt that he is.

He falsely accused Hillary Clinton and Democrats of colluding with Russia. (There is no evidence of this.)

U.S. job openings jump to record 7.3 million in December