Wilbur is Some Pig

Andy Warhol, 1962, Museum of Modern Art,  New York.

Haunted by NPR's interview with commerce secretary Wilbur Ross the other day, and a particular detail of the conversation

RACHEL MARTIN: All right. Well, we spoke to Glenn Hubbard yesterday on the program. He chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. He helped craft steel tariffs against China back in 2002. And he says they did not work. Let's listen to this.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

GLENN HUBBARD: While you do gain jobs and incomes in protected industries, you lose more in others. You know, it's not just makers of steel and aluminum. Steel and aluminum are inputs into cars, into cans, into metal that we use. And consumers are worse off, and people don't see that.

MARTIN: As you know, prices are going to go up for these products that contain steel. So the American consumer will lose in the end.

WILBUR ROSS: That's not the case at all. Let me give you, again, the actual numbers, not theoretical hypotheses. On a can of soup, on a can of beer, on a can of soda, the total impact of the increase in metal costs will be less than one-half of one cent. A fraction of one cent is not going to change life.

No love for Hubbard, who kind of blew that with the focus on consumer prices instead of job loss, but he's an exemplar of scientific probity next to Ross.

In particular, I can't get over the unhesitating prevarication when Ross equates Hubbard's experience of being centrally involved in an imposition of steel tariffs which failed with "theoretical hypotheses", and his own prop of a soup can purchased for him by some underling (he pretended he'd bought it himself, an 80-year-old near-billionaire in a bodega someplace) with "the actual numbers" even though the Trump program hasn't been implemented (or even drawn up) yet so that there certainly are no actual numbers! What a committed fraud.

Literary Corner: Assembled from the Unsaid

Lnadscape by Takeuchi Seihō (1864-1942), from somebody's Pinterest again.

Poetry about President Trump, as opposed to poetry by him, is inevitably a kind of nature poetry, a study in rapid atmospheric shifts. Here, the Secretary of Commerce, one of the president's Palm Beach neighbors and a former owner of the Bank of Cyprus, tries to capture for press reporters the feeling of wondering whether the United States will be plunged next week into a trade war with some of its closest allies (Canada, South Korea, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates, one of the main US sources for aluminum, I'll bet you didn't know that, on which a 10% import duty will be imposed, if it is raised at all, unless Trump decides to make it some other number, or make an exception for the UAE in recognition of their generous support for his son-in-law in this time of financial troubles, unless he wants to punish them for doing that because it's made him uncomfortable, or because they failed to cut him in), in delicate and mysterious brushstrokes in a tone that, as always seems to be the case with the Secretary, seems composed out of erasures, assembled from the unsaid.

Prophecy

by Wilbur Ross

Whatever his final
decision is is what
will happen. What he has
said he has said; if he
says something different,
it will be something
different. The president
has announced that this will
happen this week. I have no
reason to think otherwise.

(Text from NBC News)

Democratic senators wrote to Ross in February [2017] demanding that he disclose “the full extent of your connections to Russia”. Ross did not respond. The senators also lambasted the White House for refusing to provide answers to the questions before the vote confirming Ross.

Asked around that time whether Bank of Cyprus [of which Ross led the billion-dollar takeover from Dmitry Rybolovlev, another Palm Beach neighbor, in 2014] had any customers under US sanctions during his time there, Ross told CNN: “That’s a question that is very complicated to answer,” adding that he had never approved any such deals. [Guardian]

Notes from the Undrained Swamp

Domenico Remp (1620-99) Wunderkammer or Cabinet of Curiosities, via Wikimedia Commons.

Happened to look at the Axios front page, at a report on this evening's meeting between Schumer and McConnell, which sounds like progress since they were reported to be not speaking to each other at all this afternoon, but didn't get anywhere, and checking out the White House gossip there for just the last few hours, which is really something else, as it adds up:

1. Trump is pissed off with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, accused of "going rogue" when he was hanging out with Florida governor Rick Scott a couple of weeks ago and decided to make Florida exempt from Interior's program to force oil and gas drilling on all coastal states whether they like it or not, although Florida's Gulf Coast has the best reserves off any coast in the Lower 48, and although the way he did it is apparently illegal:

The department’s offshore leasing policies are guided by a strict process set by statute that can only take certain areas out of consideration gradually through a multi-year process that specifically weighs various factors, like environmental risks and oil and gas resource potential. By tweeting Florida would be removed just days after announcing the offshore leasing plan, and without considering any of those factors, Zinke didn’t follow the statute.

But he's not totally pissed off, because he really likes Zinke, who was a Navy Seal. I imagine it's somebody other than Trump who is truly pissed off with Zinke, and told Axios about his feelings as part of an effort to do something about this criminality. Good luck!