Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse



(Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s tariff on imported solar panels has led U.S. renewable energy companies to cancel or freeze investments of more than $2.5 billion in large installation projects, along with thousands of jobs, the developers told Reuters.

That’s more than double the about $1 billion in new spending plans announced by firms building or expanding U.S. solar panel factories to take advantage of the tax on imports.

The tariff’s bifurcated impact on the solar industry underscores how protectionist trade measures almost invariably hurt one or more domestic industries for every one they shield from foreign competition. Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, for instance, have hurt manufacturers of U.S. farm equipment made with steel, such as tractors and grain bins, along with the farmers buying them at higher prices.
 


I want to write today about a suicide that has profound moral implications for what it means to be an American in 2018. And no, I’m not talking about either Kate Spade or Anthony Bourdain (although Bourdain is oddly relevant … stay with me on this.) https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/a-family-was-separated-at-the-border-and-this-distraught-father-took-his-own-life/2018/06/08/24e40b70-6b5d-11e8-9e38-24e693b38637_story.html?utm_term=.5b0a9184c213 (This is about Marco Antonio Muñoz,) a 39-year-old Honduran who died all alone last month in a rural Texas jail cell, with an item of clothing around his neck and a small pool of blood on a padded floor.

Muñoz was a casualty of the Trump administration’s cruel and inhuman “zero tolerance” policies. Fleeing Honduras — the Central American nation wracked by a murder epidemic, gang violence and numbing poverty, Munoz, his wife and his 3-year-old son were seized by Border Patrol agents after crossing the Rio Grande into south Texas.

At the nearby processing center in McAllen, the Munoz family asked for asylum in the nation that once celebrated its willingness to accept the tired, poor and hungry of the world. But that was a different century. This is 2018, and agents instead violently ripped the toddler out of the arms of a screaming Muñoz.

“The guy lost his s—,” an unnamed agent told the Washington Post’s Nick Miroff, who broke https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/a-family-was-separated-at-the-border-and-this-distraught-father-took-his-own-life/2018/06/08/24e40b70-6b5d-11e8-9e38-24e693b38637_story.html?utm_term=.5b0a9184c213 (the story.) “They had to use physical force to take the child out of his hands.”

It seems clear that Muñoz never recovered from the trauma of that moment, or not knowing where his son had been taken. He pounded on metal bars, kicked at the van that took him away, and tried frantically to escape, leading the agents to put him in shackles before finding a padded cell for him in a county jail 40 miles away. The next morning, guards who checked on Muñoz found him praying. Thirty minutes later, they checked again and found him dead, by suicide.

...

The circumstances of these deaths are different — but they all stem from the same disease, a pathological and small-minded need to divide people. That need gets exploited by opportunistic politicians and ratings-starved media personalities instead of prompting an attempt, staring from our shared humanity, to find common-sense solutions to migration. Solutions that might save beautiful 19-year-olds with so much to live for.

Instead, the exploiter-in-chief resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., where he pays attention to few other policy issues besides keeping brown-skinned people from what he calls “shithole countries” out of the United States, ranting about the monthly number of border crossings because the short-fingered vulgarian somehow sees immigration as a threat to his fragile manhood.
 
Trump thinks he’s the brilliant gambler. He’s really the patsy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/06/11/trump-thinks-hes-the-brilliant-gambler-hes-really-the-patsy/ (Opinion | Trump thinks he’s the brilliant gambler. He’s really the patsy.)

In gambling, the winner is the player who has studied the odds carefully, applies them strategically, is resolute and fearless, and patient.

And then there is the guy who is just fearless, often wearing the accessory of flamboyance. When this guy walks in, smart gamblers smile. This is the guy they wait for. The guy who doesn’t see his limitations, who mistakes instincts for actual probabilities, maybe gets a few splashy wins upfront, and is destined to fritter away his money and walk out bankrupt. This man is President Trump.

It should be remembered that Trump casinos have gone bankrupt before. It takes some real gambling know-how to be the house and lose.

People who fancy themselves as gut players, who bend or break the protocols and conventions, who think they know better than anyone, will always lose eventually. Want another recent example? George W. Bush was a gut player too, lest we forget. He sized up the world after 9/11 and decided to gamble his presidency on a crazy long-shot side bet: war in Iraq. The odds were as bad as the rationale and the evidence, but no matter. He was the big decider. He went with his gut. Oops.

And now here we go again, times 10. It may send thrilling shivers of joy up the thighs of people who share Trump’s personality traits of ignorance and bravado, but the world is full of smarter players waiting to take advantage of the kind of openings that Trump-style play invariably creates. Brains and patience win the long game, and world history is the very definition of the long game.

In the casino, it’s guys like Trump who eventually walk out losers, and thereafter find themselves dependent on shady lenders. And such is their fate. Unfortunately, America is Trump’s spouse.
 
Trump/Russia: Secrets, spies and useful idiots

It's the story of the century: The US President and his connections to Russia.

In a Four Corners special series, award winning investigative reporter Sarah Ferguson follows the spies and the money trail from Washington, to London, to Moscow.

Part two reveals the story of two key players central to the allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.


 
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