Reality about Trump's farm bailout and the trade war in general

This is from an item that's a good summary of a lot of things.

But TrumpLove turns out to be highly selective, with more than half of the government payments going to the biggest farm owners. The Department of Agriculture initially announced a $125,000 limit on the amount any one farm could get, but every Trump deal seems to have a gimmick in it to give a special break to the slickest operators. The slickum in this deal is that assorted members of a family can claim to be owners of the same farm and be eligible for bailout money, even if they do no actual farming and live in New York City! Thus, one Missouri farm family got $2.8 million worth of subsidy love from Trump, and more than 80 families topped half a million in payments.

Meanwhile, the great majority of farmers — 80% of eligible grain farmers — got zilch from Donald the Dealmaker. The smaller producers who are most endangered by his export collapse got less than $5,000. So Trump’s “Market Facilitation” is squeezing the many who are most in need while helping a few of the largest get even bigger. - AlterNet

David Dayen has a take on the bigger picture regarding the “trade war.”

This extend-and-pretend scenario, where both sides act as if in a war but undertake no fundamental changes in the relationship, doesn’t give hope to workers on either side of the Pacific Ocean. As Robert Kuttner pointed out this week, years of neglect of China’s economic aggression gave the country putative bargaining leverage over the U.S. But the answer to that was not a tit-for-tat with tariffs, which were never going to break a mercantilist country with plenty of tools to minimize the pain. Only by disentangling supply chains that should never have been bound together in the first place would America—and even China—find a better path.

In the interim, that has begun to happen, although not through onshoring but through a race to the bottom to other low-wage Asian countries. In many ways, that exodus explains the yuan devaluation...

The bigger problem lurks around the corner: The United States has lost its productive capacity and internal know-how. We don’t know how to make many things anymore. This has reached epidemic proportions in the defense sector, where previously perfunctory operations like casting a submarine are now beyond U.S. capabilities. Boeing, our main aircraft maker, apparently has lost the ability to build safe planes. When you relentlessly outsource to cut costs for decades, you don’t just lose jobs, but the intelligence and know-how and muscle memory to manufacture. And in a number of industries that’s what has occurred. - The American Prospect