Meanwhile, as Larry Summers says, the precedent — although tiny — is not good: it’s not just crony capitalism, it’s government as protection racket, where<br />companies shape their strategies to appease politicians who will reward or punish based on how it affects their PR efforts and/or personal fortunes.<br />It says that large parts of the news media, whose credulous Trump coverage<br />and sniping at HRC helped bring us to where we are, will be even worse, even more poodle-like, now that this guy is in office.<br />When The Ridiculous Is Ominous -<br />I’m still mulling over the Carrier deal, which I suspect will be a template for the Trump years in general — again and again, we’ll see actions<br />that are ridiculous in themselves, but add up to a very scary picture.<br />Start with the ridiculous nature of the whole thing: we’re talking, it now turns out, about 800 jobs in a nation with 145 million workers.<br />How does something that isn’t even rounding error in the overall jobs picture come to dominate a couple of news cycles?<br />Around 75,000 workers lose their jobs every working day.
