Having been involved in bids to various governments, including Federal, when obama promised the funding would go to projects with “shovel ready jobs” implying it would be months that was full blown ignorance on his part.

The procurement process on its own accord is hard pressed to have a 12 month turnaround, let alone the lead time it takes to transfer and allocate the funding within a department / agency, environmental and other regulatory reviews, etc., etc..

It could have all been “fastpathed” by the POTUS by executive order (by some kind of “emergency” declaration), but that has its own issues (e.g. open him up for charges of favoritism).
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My HUGE beef with all this “infrastructure investment” talk on the part of politicians is that they under-fund and defer politically invisible maintenance on existing infrastructure, often in favor of politically visible, shiny, new, “jobs creating” infrastructure.

What are the chances that funding for this new set of infrastructure projects on the part of trump won’t have any set-aside, let alone projection of future maintenance costs, that needs to be in a future budget?

Republicans have this habit of thinking anyone that believes in their religion or Constitutional ideology, has to be a good guy.

An insightful remark. Have a Happy Thanksgiving, Y. And everyone.

I’ve also noted that before.

Many of Japanese zaibatsu, use primogeniture in the feudal tradition.

In the West, large corporations can’t be passed from father to son with any kind of quality of transmission. The culture negates it and doesn’t support it. Rags to riches, to rags stories. Too much focus on individualism and making one’s own way with no connections to any tradition or clan.

Bannon and other Breitbart editors/reporters split on the issue of Bannon preferring Trum’s version of the story to a Breitbart reporter’s claim that one of Trum’s staff manhandled her. As if she was a SJW Leftist, an enemy of the campaign. Then later Trum and his staff lied about this ever happening, and Bannon believed it.

Republicans have this habit of thinking anyone that believes in their religion or Constitutional ideology, has to be a good guy. It’s like living in a bubble. It was not true of the Left’s triumvirates, and it isn’t true of Americans either.

Bannon shouldn’t give interviews. They expose too much. And he should lay off the icing.

Infrastructure needs to be done, but the $895 billion that was supposed to go for infrastructure in 2009 never made it to jobs because it takes time to tee them up – mostly due to environmental regs. So, the Obama administration gave it out to their favorite Dem organizations and made it a permanent part of the budget. Don’t want to see that again. It can take a year of Environmental Impact Studies before a shovel of dirt is moved. Build America Bonds could be used to raise money to do the work, but should only be sold when projects are ready to go, not before. I sure don’t want to see that kind of profligate deficit spending in the budget again.

“We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution” – steve bunion on the trillion dollar (deficit?) infrastructure plan he is pushing
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-18/steve-bannon-interviewed-issue-now-about-americans-looking-not-get-f%E2%80%94ed-over

As for the agency issue of executives truly representing the shareholders, I happen to agree that there has been an overly cozy relationship between them and the BOD, to the detriment of shareholders in some (many?) cases.

Personally, I would vest executive share options beginning after 5 years, and have a release schedule that goes out to 20 years, with 75% of the shares released in the latter half.

Too many get rewarded for financial manipulations, stock buybacks, and short term cuts (e.g. outsource overseas).

But, this all is far from the discussion wrt bunion.

Trump is not the CEO of a publicly held company. As such he can pretty much do what he wants. What I’m speaking of is the managerial class at publicly held companies. They are employees of the stockholders and at one time the Boards of Directors (BODs) were the stockholder’s’ watchdogs to prevent them from looting the companies. Starting in the late 60s BODs became increasingly made up of company insiders or close allies of the management teams. With the friendly boards the managements were able to award themselves increasingly rich salaries while the stockholders and employees took a backseat. Not all management teams took that road, but enough to make it a major concern for anyone interested in honest corporate governance. The government – business crony capitalism is one form of corruption. The BODs that are packed with insiders and allies of the managers is another.

The Other Chuck: “……the stranglehold unions have placed on businesses from the other end. I saw first hand how that can destroy a large, well meaning business.”

Yes, unions are a problem. At least in the form where the managements of the union are professional union thugs as they are in the SEIU, UAW, the Teamsters, and other nationally organized and managed unions. Over the last 30 years of labor surpluses the unions have steadily lost power and membership. One reason is that companies shipped the work overseas. Another is that right to work laws have blunted their tyrannical control over workers. The only unions that are fairly strong are the ones that ought not to exist – the government employees unions. I could write a small book on why government employees do not need to be unionized, but the primary one is that government employees have better job security than employees in any other part of our economy.

A union can be a good thing in a company where there are a lot of people performing the same jobs. It provides a voice to the workers for pay, time off, safety, and other issues that arise on the job. During the years after WWII (1946 – 1970s) there was a shortage of labor in this country and the unions became too powerful and infiltrated by thugs who didn’t care about the union members or the companies that employed them.

I was a member of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), which was a pretty good union. It was never run by outsiders. It was a loose association of local chapters and compulsory membership was not required. In spite of that, 95% of the pilots at my airline were members. Each airline’s union was unique in it’s work rules, pay scales, and benefits. Although there was always a vocal minority that considered management to be the “enemy,” for the most part the membership recognized that our jobs were dependent on the success of the company. As such, we worked with management to promote a successful operation. When the hotel management team came along, that all changed for the worse. It took 15 years for things to come to a head. After two years of negotiations they locked the ALPA pilots off the property and began hiring replacements.(Or SCABS as we called them.) Fortunately for me and my 4500 fellow pilots, we came up with a legal maneuver based on a rather well known provision of labor law that forced them to take us back and reinstate us in our jobs. It was a close thing, but from that point on (8 years for me) the atmosphere was one of mutual distrust and anger. Retirement came as a release from a situation, which at one time had been a delight to go to work, that had become one of grimly working to do your best possible job while feeling despised by the management.

As to Ben Shapiro’s take on Bannon, I would not expect it to be favorable. They split rather quickly on Shapiro’s dislike of Trump versus Bannon’s support. Bannon is an experienced businessman and investor. Shapiro is an intellectual pundit. They are about as different as oil and water. I’m willing to reserve judgment on Bannon until I see more.