The agriculture sector, which has been hurt by President Trump’s trade war and the pandemic, is expected to receive a total of approximately $46 billion in federal subsidies this year. Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York Times
For the American farmers President Trump counts on for support, the government money is flowing faster than ever.
Federal payments to farmers are projected to hit a record $46 billion this year as the White House funnels money to Mr. Trump’s rural base in the South and Midwest ahead of Election Day.
The gush of funds has accelerated in recent weeks as the president looks to help his core supporters who have been hit hard by the double whammy of his combative trade practices and the coronavirus pandemic. According to the American Farm Bureau, debt in the farm sector is projected to increase by 4 percent to a record $434 billion this year and farm bankruptcies have continued to rise across the country.
Farmers are not the only constituency benefiting from the president’s largess: He has promised $200 prescription drug cards to millions of seniors, approved $13 billion in aid to Puerto Rico, which could help his prospects in Florida, and he directed his Agriculture Department include letters signed by him in millions of food aid boxes that are being distributed to the poor.
Millions of food aid boxes that are being distributed include letters bearing President Trump’s signature.
But few have gotten more help than the agriculture sector, which this year is expected to receive the largest government contribution to farm income since its previous record in 2005, according to the University of Missouri’s Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute. The breadth of the payments means that government support will account for about 40 percent of total farm income this year. If not for those subsidies, U.S. farm income would be poised to decline in 2020.
“There are both economic and political motivations for these payments,” said Patrick Westhoff, who directs University of Missouri’s agriculture research center.
Last week, the Office of Special Counsel determined that Mr. Trump’s Agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue, had improperly used his position to push the president’s re-election by promising more help for farmers. At an August event in North Carolina, Mr. Perdue violated ethics laws when he promoted Mr. Trump’s re-election during remarks about the Farmers to Families Food Box Program, saying: “That’s what’s going to continue to happen — four more years — if America gets out and votes for this man, Donald J. Trump.”
Mr. Perdue has been ordered to reimburse the government for the costs associated with his attendance at the event. In its response to the Office of Special Counsel, the Agriculture Department said that Mr. Perdue did not “encourage attendees to vote for a candidate or party or advocate for a partisan political group.”
More money for farmers will soon be on the way. Congress recently agreed to replenish an Agriculture Department fund that Mr. Trump has used to disburse nearly $30 billion to farmers at his discretion with tens of billions of additional dollars. The Trump administration negotiated with Democrats to ensure the money was included in a short-term bill to fund the federal government, with the White House agreeing to more funds for child nutritional assistance in exchange.
Farmers have been clobbered financially during the last two years, as Mr. Trump’s trade wars with China and Europe led to tariffs on American agricultural exports, including corn, soybeans, lobsters and peanuts. Then, this year, the pandemic interfered with global supply chains, and restaurant and hotel closures sapped demand. Farmers were forced to dump milk into manure pits and destroy millions of pounds of beans and cabbage.
“Nearly every major sector of the farm economy will have lower cash receipts this year compared to last year, and total cash receipts will be the lowest since 2010,” John Newton, the American Farm Bureau’s chief economist, wrote in a report on the state of the industry last month.
The desire to help struggling farmers is bipartisan, but Democrats and critics of the aid programs have argued that the money has been paid out unevenly by the Trump administration and with the intent of currying favor with a politically important constituency in swing states.
“For the first time in history, a president has repeatedly usurped congressional authority in order to personally dispense tens of billions of dollars in federal farm subsidy payments that would not otherwise have been paid,” said Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization that has been tracking the agriculture payments. “This is an authoritarian power grab used to buy political support from voters who are essential to his re-election.”
The president has only reinforced those concerns. At a September campaign rally in Wisconsin, a big farm state, Mr. Trump announced that an additional $13 billion in aid would soon be paid out through the Commodity Credit Corporation, a pot of money that the Trump administration had used to provide financial help to farmers suffering from retaliatory tariffs placed on American products.
“I’m proud to announce that I’m doing even more to support Wisconsin farmers,” Mr. Trump said, adding that some of that money would go to dairy, cranberry and ginseng farmers in the state that have been hurt by the coronavirus pandemic.
Not all farmers received special payouts during the last three years, but the Trump administration has recently moved to ensure that those in critical states do not miss out.
That includes the tobacco industry, which was prohibited from receiving any of the trade assistance because of legal restrictions against subsidizing the sector. In September, the Agriculture Department quietly shifted some of the funds that were allocated to its Commodity Credit Corporation fund — which legally cannot subsidize tobacco — into a separate account that can bankroll the crop. Tobacco farmers will receive up to $100 million in payments, easing some of the financial pain that has been felt particularly hard in the battleground state of North Carolina.
President Donald Trump's campaign is running an online political ad that uses an image of his vice president, his Pentagon chief and his most senior military adviser watching the raid on ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from the Situation Room on Oct. 29, 2019.
Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley walks toward the Senate after briefing members of Congress in January Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo
"President Trump wants you to request your ballot," the ad says. Clicking on the ad, which includes the tagline "Paid for by Donald J. Trump for President, Inc," leads to the Trump campaign's voter sign-up page .
But the campaign didn't seek approval from Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley to use his image in the ad, a defense official said. “This photo, like many others, was not used with [Milley's] knowledge or consent,” said the official, who requested anonymity to speak about a sensitive topic.
The military has strict rules against uniformed service members participating in political campaigns, and the ad is just the latest example of the president or those around him pulling the nation's highest-ranking officer and other Defense Department officials into the political realm.
"As a matter of long-standing policy, military service members and federal employees acting in their official capacity may not engage in activities that associate the DOD with any partisan political campaign or elections, candidate, cause or issue," the DOD's website states in a post from March 2019.
Active-duty service members are prohibited from participating in fundraisers, speaking before partisan gatherings and wearing military uniforms at campaign events, according to DoD.
Milley himself has in recent weeks stressed the military's apolitical nature, as politicians prepare for the possibility of a contested election and as Trump repeatedly suggests he might not accept the results if he is not declared the winner.
The military plays no role in domestic politics, Milley told NPR on Sunday in a rare interview.
"We, the U.S. military, we are sworn to obey the lawful orders of our civilian leadership," Milley said. "And we want to ensure that there is always civilian leadership, civilian control of the military, and we will obey the lawful orders of civilian control of the military."
Milley added that he is "very confident" in the ability of American institutions to manage election disputes.
"This isn't the first time that someone has suggested that there might be a contested election," Milley said. "And if there is, it'll be handled appropriately by the courts and by the U.S. Congress. There's no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election. Zero. There is no role there."
Jim Golby, a former Pentagon official who is now a senior fellow at the Clements Center at the University of Texas of Austin, called the ad "a disturbing violation of civil-military norms by the President's campaign."
"There is simply no reason for a sitting chairman of the Joint Chiefs to be included in an advertisement paid for by the campaign," Golby said. "Milley should denounce his inclusion in the ad, but the president never should have put him in this situation."
Spokespeople for the Pentagon and the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Both Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper took pains to separate themselves from politics this summer, after Trump staged a photo op holding a bible in front of St. John's Church on June 1. Esper posed for the photo while Milley stood to the side. Esper later said he didn't know that law enforcement would be clearing Lafayette Square ahead of the event, and Milley expressed regret for taking part .
“The comments attributed to me without my permission in the GOP campaign ad were taken out of context from a broad statement I made months ago about the efforts of federal public health officials," he said.
President Trump promised that a Foxconn manufacturing plant would create 13,000 jobs in the state of Wisconsin, even calling it the “eighth wonder of the world.” But the electronics maker never built the factory it had originally pitched to Wisconsin legislators, nor did it hire anywhere close to 13,000 people. Now, Foxconn will not receive billions of dollars in tax subsidies after all.
According to The Verge , contract negotiations between the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, which makes LCD screens for all sorts of devices, and Wisconsin’s state legislature have fallen through because Foxconn has failed to deliver what it promised in its original contract: a Milwaukee-based U.S. headquarters with a Gen 10.5 LCD factory.
President Donald Trump speaks to guests during a groundbreaking ceremony for the $10 billion Foxconn factory complex on June 28, 2018 in Mt. Pleasant, Wis. Scott Olson (Getty Images)
The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) rejected Foxconn’s application for tax subsidie s because it needed to employ at least 520 people by the end of 2019. Foxconn said it had hired 550 people, but the WEDC said only 281 of those employees qualify under the terms of the contract. According to The Verge, some employees out of that 281 could have been deemed ineligible because they made less than $30,000 a year or were not based in Wisconsin.
This Foxconn saga goes back to 2016, when the then-Governor Scott Walker and the majority-Republican state legislature agreed to give the company $3 billion in tax breaks and incentives if its headquarters were based in Milwaukee. In 2018, Foxconn purchased a large office building in the city with enough room for around 500 workers—by all accounts seemed like the company was actually going through with it. But in 2019, Foxconn announced that it wasn’t going to build a factory in Milwaukee afte rall. The company told Gizmodo that it had changed its plans due to changes within the global market.
“After productive discussions between the White House and the company, and after a personal conversation between President Donald J. Trump and Chairman Terry Gou, Foxconn is moving forward with our planned construction of a Gen 6 fab facility,” Foxconn said in a statement to the Milwaukee Business Journal and CNBC . The company’s Gen 6 facility would only made phone screens, instead of the Gen 10.5 facility that was originally planned to manufacture TV screens.
But several obvious signs appeared that the deal was a bad move. By April 2019, not only had the company hired just 178 people out of the 13,000 it was supposed to, but it hadn’t even opened its factory . Gov. Tony Evers had replaced Scott Walker by that point and was set to renegotiate the subsidies deal with Foxconn. By July of 2019, Wisconsin State Assemblyman Gordon Hintz said the company was expected to hire 1,500 instead of 13,000 people —a more realistic number.
And that brings us to where we are today.
Other than not hiring the contractually agreed upon number of employees, the contract between Foxconn and the state of Wisconsin also stipulated that the company build a Gen 10.5 LCD factory, not a Gen 6. That factory was supposed to be 20 million square feet; its Gen 6 building is just 1 million square feet.
Foxconn was also supposed to invest $3.3 billion by the end of 2019 into its factory, per the terms of its contract, but it only invested between $280-300 million. If Foxconn doesn’t maintain at least 5,850 employees by the end of 2023, the WEDC could take back any subsidiary payments the state has already paid out.
Foxconn told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel it was “surprised” by the state’s decision and that it “threatens good faith negotiations” to revise the contract.
The agriculture sector, which has been hurt by President Trump’s trade war and the pandemic,
is expected to receive a total of approximately $46 billion in federal subsidies this year.
Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York Times
Trump Funnels Record Subsidies to Farmers Ahead of Election Day
Despite an extraordinary government bailout, America’s agriculture sector remains under severe economic pressure
For the American farmers President Trump counts on for support, the government money is flowing faster than ever.
Federal payments to farmers are projected to hit a record $46 billion this year as the White House funnels money to Mr. Trump’s rural base in the South and Midwest ahead of Election Day.
The gush of funds has accelerated in recent weeks as the president looks to help his core supporters who have been hit hard by the double whammy of his combative trade practices and the coronavirus pandemic. According to the American Farm Bureau, debt in the farm sector is projected to increase by 4 percent to a record $434 billion this year and farm bankruptcies have continued to rise across the country.
Farmers are not the only constituency benefiting from the president’s largess: He has promised $200 prescription drug cards to millions of seniors, approved $13 billion in aid to Puerto Rico, which could help his prospects in Florida, and he directed his Agriculture Department include letters signed by him in millions of food aid boxes that are being distributed to the poor.
Millions of food aid boxes that are being distributed
include letters bearing President Trump’s signature.
But few have gotten more help than the agriculture sector, which this year is expected to receive the largest government contribution to farm income since its previous record in 2005, according to the University of Missouri’s Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute. The breadth of the payments means that government support will account for about 40 percent of total farm income this year. If not for those subsidies, U.S. farm income would be poised to decline in 2020.
“There are both economic and political motivations for these payments,” said Patrick Westhoff, who directs University of Missouri’s agriculture research center.
Last week, the Office of Special Counsel determined that Mr. Trump’s Agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue, had improperly used his position to push the president’s re-election by promising more help for farmers. At an August event in North Carolina, Mr. Perdue violated ethics laws when he promoted Mr. Trump’s re-election during remarks about the Farmers to Families Food Box Program, saying: “That’s what’s going to continue to happen — four more years — if America gets out and votes for this man, Donald J. Trump.”
Mr. Perdue has been ordered to reimburse the government for the costs associated with his attendance at the event. In its response to the Office of Special Counsel, the Agriculture Department said that Mr. Perdue did not “encourage attendees to vote for a candidate or party or advocate for a partisan political group.”
More money for farmers will soon be on the way. Congress recently agreed to replenish an Agriculture Department fund that Mr. Trump has used to disburse nearly $30 billion to farmers at his discretion with tens of billions of additional dollars. The Trump administration negotiated with Democrats to ensure the money was included in a short-term bill to fund the federal government, with the White House agreeing to more funds for child nutritional assistance in exchange.
Farmers have been clobbered financially during the last two years, as Mr. Trump’s trade wars with China and Europe led to tariffs on American agricultural exports, including corn, soybeans, lobsters and peanuts. Then, this year, the pandemic interfered with global supply chains, and restaurant and hotel closures sapped demand. Farmers were forced to dump milk into manure pits and destroy millions of pounds of beans and cabbage.
“Nearly every major sector of the farm economy will have lower cash receipts this year compared to last year, and total cash receipts will be the lowest since 2010,” John Newton, the American Farm Bureau’s chief economist, wrote in a report on the state of the industry last month.
The desire to help struggling farmers is bipartisan, but Democrats and critics of the aid programs have argued that the money has been paid out unevenly by the Trump administration and with the intent of currying favor with a politically important constituency in swing states.
“For the first time in history, a president has repeatedly usurped congressional authority in order to personally dispense tens of billions of dollars in federal farm subsidy payments that would not otherwise have been paid,” said Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization that has been tracking the agriculture payments. “This is an authoritarian power grab used to buy political support from voters who are essential to his re-election.”
The president has only reinforced those concerns. At a September campaign rally in Wisconsin, a big farm state, Mr. Trump announced that an additional $13 billion in aid would soon be paid out through the Commodity Credit Corporation, a pot of money that the Trump administration had used to provide financial help to farmers suffering from retaliatory tariffs placed on American products.
“I’m proud to announce that I’m doing even more to support Wisconsin farmers,” Mr. Trump said, adding that some of that money would go to dairy, cranberry and ginseng farmers in the state that have been hurt by the coronavirus pandemic.
Not all farmers received special payouts during the last three years, but the Trump administration has recently moved to ensure that those in critical states do not miss out.
That includes the tobacco industry, which was prohibited from receiving any of the trade assistance because of legal restrictions against subsidizing the sector. In September, the Agriculture Department quietly shifted some of the funds that were allocated to its Commodity Credit Corporation fund — which legally cannot subsidize tobacco — into a separate account that can bankroll the crop. Tobacco farmers will receive up to $100 million in payments, easing some of the financial pain that has been felt particularly hard in the battleground state of North Carolina.
There's a lot more in the Original Article.
"Are you proud of your support for President Trump?"
McSally dodges the question...
Top general did not give his consent to be used in Trump political ad
The photo featuring Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley was used without the officer's "knowledge or consent," according to a defense official
Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley walks
toward the Senate after briefing members of
Congress in January
Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo
"President Trump wants you to request your ballot," the ad says. Clicking on the ad, which includes the tagline "Paid for by Donald J. Trump for President, Inc," leads to the Trump campaign's voter sign-up page .
But the campaign didn't seek approval from Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley to use his image in the ad, a defense official said. “This photo, like many others, was not used with [Milley's] knowledge or consent,” said the official, who requested anonymity to speak about a sensitive topic.
The military has strict rules against uniformed service members participating in political campaigns, and the ad is just the latest example of the president or those around him pulling the nation's highest-ranking officer and other Defense Department officials into the political realm.
"As a matter of long-standing policy, military service members and federal employees acting in their official capacity may not engage in activities that associate the DOD with any partisan political campaign or elections, candidate, cause or issue," the DOD's website states in a post from March 2019.
Active-duty service members are prohibited from participating in fundraisers, speaking before partisan gatherings and wearing military uniforms at campaign events, according to DoD.
Milley himself has in recent weeks stressed the military's apolitical nature, as politicians prepare for the possibility of a contested election and as Trump repeatedly suggests he might not accept the results if he is not declared the winner.
The military plays no role in domestic politics, Milley told NPR on Sunday in a rare interview.
"We, the U.S. military, we are sworn to obey the lawful orders of our civilian leadership," Milley said. "And we want to ensure that there is always civilian leadership, civilian control of the military, and we will obey the lawful orders of civilian control of the military."
Milley added that he is "very confident" in the ability of American institutions to manage election disputes.
"This isn't the first time that someone has suggested that there might be a contested election," Milley said. "And if there is, it'll be handled appropriately by the courts and by the U.S. Congress. There's no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election. Zero. There is no role there."
Jim Golby, a former Pentagon official who is now a senior fellow at the Clements Center at the University of Texas of Austin, called the ad "a disturbing violation of civil-military norms by the President's campaign."
"There is simply no reason for a sitting chairman of the Joint Chiefs to be included in an advertisement paid for by the campaign," Golby said. "Milley should denounce his inclusion in the ad, but the president never should have put him in this situation."
Spokespeople for the Pentagon and the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Both Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper took pains to separate themselves from politics this summer, after Trump staged a photo op holding a bible in front of St. John's Church on June 1. Esper posed for the photo while Milley stood to the side. Esper later said he didn't know that law enforcement would be clearing Lafayette Square ahead of the event, and Milley expressed regret for taking part .
The ad featuring Esper and Milley surfaced a day after Anthony Fauci criticized the Trump campaign for including him in an ad .
“The comments attributed to me without my permission in the GOP campaign ad were taken out of context from a broad statement I made months ago about the efforts of federal public health officials," he said.
What's wrong with this general??
He swore to obey President Trump, didn't he?
Foxconn Won't Get Tax Subsidies After Failing to Deliver Factory and Jobs It Promised
President Trump promised that a Foxconn manufacturing plant would create 13,000 jobs in the state of Wisconsin, even calling it the “eighth wonder of the world.” But the electronics maker never built the factory it had originally pitched to Wisconsin legislators, nor did it hire anywhere close to 13,000 people. Now, Foxconn will not receive billions of dollars in tax subsidies after all.
President Donald Trump speaks to guests during a groundbreaking ceremony for the $10 billion Foxconn factory complex on June 28, 2018 in Mt. Pleasant, Wis.
Scott Olson (Getty Images)
The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) rejected Foxconn’s application for tax subsidie s because it needed to employ at least 520 people by the end of 2019. Foxconn said it had hired 550 people, but the WEDC said only 281 of those employees qualify under the terms of the contract. According to The Verge, some employees out of that 281 could have been deemed ineligible because they made less than $30,000 a year or were not based in Wisconsin.
This Foxconn saga goes back to 2016, when the then-Governor Scott Walker and the majority-Republican state legislature agreed to give the company $3 billion in tax breaks and incentives if its headquarters were based in Milwaukee. In 2018, Foxconn purchased a large office building in the city with enough room for around 500 workers—by all accounts seemed like the company was actually going through with it. But in 2019, Foxconn announced that it wasn’t going to build a factory in Milwaukee afte rall. The company told Gizmodo that it had changed its plans due to changes within the global market.
From there, the situation became more convoluted. The day after Foxconn decided not to build its factory in Wisconsin, President Trump somehow managed to convince the company to do it anyway.
“After productive discussions between the White House and the company, and after a personal conversation between President Donald J. Trump and Chairman Terry Gou, Foxconn is moving forward with our planned construction of a Gen 6 fab facility,” Foxconn said in a statement to the Milwaukee Business Journal and CNBC . The company’s Gen 6 facility would only made phone screens, instead of the Gen 10.5 facility that was originally planned to manufacture TV screens.
But several obvious signs appeared that the deal was a bad move. By April 2019, not only had the company hired just 178 people out of the 13,000 it was supposed to, but it hadn’t even opened its factory . Gov. Tony Evers had replaced Scott Walker by that point and was set to renegotiate the subsidies deal with Foxconn. By July of 2019, Wisconsin State Assemblyman Gordon Hintz said the company was expected to hire 1,500 instead of 13,000 people —a more realistic number.
And that brings us to where we are today.
Other than not hiring the contractually agreed upon number of employees, the contract between Foxconn and the state of Wisconsin also stipulated that the company build a Gen 10.5 LCD factory, not a Gen 6. That factory was supposed to be 20 million square feet; its Gen 6 building is just 1 million square feet.
Foxconn was also supposed to invest $3.3 billion by the end of 2019 into its factory, per the terms of its contract, but it only invested between $280-300 million. If Foxconn doesn’t maintain at least 5,850 employees by the end of 2023, the WEDC could take back any subsidiary payments the state has already paid out.
Foxconn told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel it was “surprised” by the state’s decision and that it “threatens good faith negotiations” to revise the contract.
Kinda sounds like the "World's Greatest Dealmaker" was bamboozled by some Chinese...
So how's that ''trade war'' working out?
Record subsidies for farmers, billions, and billions in tariff cost to the US, and still our trade deficit hit the highest level since 2006.
Great job Brownie.