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Aug 06, 2011 | nytimes.com
When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. Three-quarters of a million people lost their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment, with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit.
In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and suffering, and that he would restore order and safety. What they were waiting for, in broad strokes, was a story something like this:
"I know you're scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn't work out. And it didn't work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods, with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can't promise that we won't make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that your government has your back again." A story isn't a policy. But that simple narrative - and the policies that would naturally have flowed from it - would have inoculated against much of what was to come in the intervening two and a half years of failed government, idled factories and idled hands. That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement. It would have made clear that the problem wasn't tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit - a deficit that didn't exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.
And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters, but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.
But there was no story - and there has been none since.
In similar circumstances, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. Beginning in his first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise. In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden, he thundered, "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me - and I welcome their hatred."
When Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office, he stepped into a cycle of American history, best exemplified by F.D.R. and his distant cousin, Teddy. After a great technological revolution or a major economic transition, as when America changed from a nation of farmers to an urban industrial one, there is often a period of great concentration of wealth, and with it, a concentration of power in the wealthy. That's what we saw in 1928, and that's what we see today. At some point that power is exercised so injudiciously, and the lives of so many become so unbearable, that a period of reform ensues - and a charismatic reformer emerges to lead that renewal. In that sense, Teddy Roosevelt started the cycle of reform his cousin picked up 30 years later, as he began efforts to bust the trusts and regulate the railroads, exercise federal power over the banks and the nation's food supply, and protect America's land and wildlife, creating the modern environmental movement.
Those were the shoes - that was the historic role - that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill. The president is fond of referring to "the arc of history," paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous statement that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics - in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time - he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.
When Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should wait for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking with a voice that cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth of police dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that whether a bully hid behind a club or a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his true and repugnant face in public.
IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public - a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his temperament just didn't bend that far.
Michael August 7, 2011
Bill Levine August 7, 2011Eloquently expressed and horrifically accurate, this excellent analysis articulates the frustration that so many of us have felt watching Mr...
AnAverageAmerican August 7, 2011Very well put. I know that I have been going through Kübler-Ross's stages of grief ever since the foxes (a.k.a. Geithner and Summers) were...
cdearman Santa Fe, NM August 7, 2011"In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it,...
SP California August 7, 2011Unfortunately, the Democratic Congress of 2008-2010, did not have the will to make the economic and social program decisions that would have improved the economic situation for the middle-class; and it is becoming more obvious that President Obama does not have the temperament to publicly push for programs and policies that he wants the congress to enact.
The American people have a problem: we reelect Obama and hope for the best; or we elect a Republican and expect the worst. There is no question that the Health Care law that was just passed would be reversed; Medicare and Medicare would be gutted; and who knows what would happen to Social Security. You can be sure, though, that business taxes and regulation reforms would not be in the cards and those regulations that have been enacted would be reversed. We have traveled this road before and we should be wise enough not to travel it again!farospace san francisco August 7, 2011Brilliant analysis - and I suspect that a very large number of those who voted for President Obama will recognize in this the thoughts that they have been trying to ignore, or have been trying not to say out loud. Later historians can complete this analysis and attempt to explain exactly why Mr. Obama has turned out the way he has - but right now, it may be time to ask a more relevant and urgent question.
If it is not too late, will a challenger emerge in time before the 2012 elections, or will we be doomed to hold our noses and endure another four years of this?
Richard Katz American in Oxford, UK August 7, 2011Very eloquent and exactly to the point. Like many others, I was enthralled by the rhetoric of his story, making the leap of faith (or hope) that because he could tell his story so well, he could tell, as you put it, "the story the American people were waiting to hear."
Disappointment has darkened into disillusion, disillusion into a species of despair. Will I vote for Barack Obama again? What are the options?
An Ordinary American Prague August 7, 2011This is the most brilliant and tragic story I have read in a long time---in fact, precisely since I read when Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt. When will a leader emerge with a true moral vision for the federal government and for our country? Someone who sees government as a balance to capitalism, and a means to achieve the social and economic justice that we (yes, we) believe in? Will that leadership arrive before parts of America come to look like the dystopia of Johannesburg?
We (yes, we) recognise that capitalism is the most efficient way to maximise overall prosperity and quality of life. But we also recognise that unfettered, it will ravage the environment, abuse labor, and expand income disparity until violence or tragedy (or both) ensues.
These are the lessons we've learned since the industrial revolution, and they're the ones that we should be drawing from the past decade. We recognise that we need a strong federal government to check these tendencies, and to strike a stable, sustainable balance between prosperity, community, opportunity, wealth, justice, freedom. We need a voice to fill the moral vacuum that has allowed the Koch/Tea/Fox Party to emerge and grab power.
Americans know this---including, of course, President Obama (see his April 13 speech at GW University). But as this article by Dr. Westen so effectively shows, Obama is incompetent to lead us back to America's traditional position on the global economic/political spectrum. He's brilliant and eloquent. He's achieved personal success that is inspirational. He's done some good things as president. But he is not competent to lead us back to a state of American morality, where government is the protector of those who work hard, and the provider of opportunity to all Americans.
Taxes, subsidies, entitlements, laws... these are the tools we have available to achieve our national moral vision. But the vision has been muddled (hijacked?) and that is our biggest problem. -->
martin Portland, Oregon August 7, 2011I voted for Obama. I thought then, and still think, he's a decent person, a smart person, a person who wants to do the best he can for others. When I voted for him, I was thinking he's a centrist who will find a way to unite our increasingly polarized and ugly politics in the USA. Or if not unite us, at least forge a way to get some important things done despite the ugly polarization.
And I must confess, I have been disappointed. Deeply so. He has not united us. He has not forged a way to accomplish what needs to be done. He has not been a leader.
I've heard him called a mediator, a conciliator, a compromiser, etc. Those terms indicate someone who is bringing divergent views together and moving us along. That's part of what a leader does, though not all. Yet I don't think he's even lived up to his reputation as a mediator.
Almost three years after I voted for Obama, I still don't know what he's doing other than trying to help the financial industry: the wealthy who benefit most from it and the technocrats who run it for them. But average working people, people like myself and my daughter and my grandson, have not been helped. We are worse off than before. And millions of unemployed and underemployed are even worse off than my family is.
So whatever else he is (and that still remains a mystery to me), President Obama is not the leader I thought I was voting for. Which leaves me feeling confused and close to apathetic about what to do as a voter in 2012. More of the same isn't worth voting for. Yet I don't see anyone out there who offers the possibility of doing better.
This was an extraordinarily well written, eloquent and comprehensive indictment of the failure of the Obama presidency.
If a credible primary challenger to Obama ever could arise, the positions and analysis in this column would be all he or she would need to justify the Democratic party's need to seek new leadership.
I knew that Obama was a charade early on when giving a speech about the banking failures to the nation, instead of giving the narrative Mr. Westen accurately recommended on the origins of the orgy of greed that just crippled our economy and caused suffering for millions of Americans, he said "we don't disparage wealth in America." I was dumbfounded.
He should have been condemning the craven, wanton, greed of nihilistic financial gangsters who hijacked our economy. Instead he seemed to be calling for all Americans not to hate rich people. That was not the point. Americans don't hate rich people, but they should hate rich people who acquire their wealth at the expense of the well being of an entire nation through irresponsible, avaricious, and in some instances illegal practices, and legally bribe politicians to enact laws which allow them to run amok over our economy without supervision or regulation.
I knew then that Obama was either a political lemon, in over his head, an extremely conflict averse neurotic individual with a compulsive need for some delusional ideal of neutrality in political and social relations, or a political phony beholden to the same forces that almost destroyed the country as Republicans are.
Perhaps all of these are true.
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Aug 06, 2011 | nytimes.com
When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. Three-quarters of a million people lost their jobs that month. Many had lost their homes, and with them the only nest eggs they had. Even the usually impervious upper middle class had seen a decade of stagnant or declining investment, with the stock market dropping in value with no end in sight. Hope was as scarce as credit.
In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end. They needed to hear that he understood what they were feeling, that he would track down those responsible for their pain and suffering, and that he would restore order and safety. What they were waiting for, in broad strokes, was a story something like this:
"I know you're scared and angry. Many of you have lost your jobs, your homes, your hope. This was a disaster, but it was not a natural disaster. It was made by Wall Street gamblers who speculated with your lives and futures. It was made by conservative extremists who told us that if we just eliminated regulations and rewarded greed and recklessness, it would all work out. But it didn't work out. And it didn't work out 80 years ago, when the same people sold our grandparents the same bill of goods, with the same results. But we learned something from our grandparents about how to fix it, and we will draw on their wisdom. We will restore business confidence the old-fashioned way: by putting money back in the pockets of working Americans by putting them back to work, and by restoring integrity to our financial markets and demanding it of those who want to run them. I can't promise that we won't make mistakes along the way. But I can promise you that they will be honest mistakes, and that your government has your back again." A story isn't a policy. But that simple narrative - and the policies that would naturally have flowed from it - would have inoculated against much of what was to come in the intervening two and a half years of failed government, idled factories and idled hands. That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement. It would have made clear that the problem wasn't tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit - a deficit that didn't exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.
And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters, but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.
But there was no story - and there has been none since.
In similar circumstances, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right. Beginning in his first inaugural address, and in the fireside chats that followed, he explained how the crash had happened, and he minced no words about those who had caused it. He promised to do something no president had done before: to use the resources of the United States to put Americans directly to work, building the infrastructure we still rely on today. He swore to keep the people who had caused the crisis out of the halls of power, and he made good on that promise. In a 1936 speech at Madison Square Garden, he thundered, "Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me - and I welcome their hatred."
When Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office, he stepped into a cycle of American history, best exemplified by F.D.R. and his distant cousin, Teddy. After a great technological revolution or a major economic transition, as when America changed from a nation of farmers to an urban industrial one, there is often a period of great concentration of wealth, and with it, a concentration of power in the wealthy. That's what we saw in 1928, and that's what we see today. At some point that power is exercised so injudiciously, and the lives of so many become so unbearable, that a period of reform ensues - and a charismatic reformer emerges to lead that renewal. In that sense, Teddy Roosevelt started the cycle of reform his cousin picked up 30 years later, as he began efforts to bust the trusts and regulate the railroads, exercise federal power over the banks and the nation's food supply, and protect America's land and wildlife, creating the modern environmental movement.
Those were the shoes - that was the historic role - that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill. The president is fond of referring to "the arc of history," paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous statement that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics - in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time - he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.
When Dr. King spoke of the great arc bending toward justice, he did not mean that we should wait for it to bend. He exhorted others to put their full weight behind it, and he gave his life speaking with a voice that cut through the blistering force of water cannons and the gnashing teeth of police dogs. He preached the gospel of nonviolence, but he knew that whether a bully hid behind a club or a poll tax, the only effective response was to face the bully down, and to make the bully show his true and repugnant face in public.
IN contrast, when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public - a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it. Had the president chosen to bend the arc of history, he would have told the public the story of the destruction wrought by the dismantling of the New Deal regulations that had protected them for more than half a century. He would have offered them a counternarrative of how to fix the problem other than the politics of appeasement, one that emphasized creating economic demand and consumer confidence by putting consumers back to work. He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his temperament just didn't bend that far.
Michael August 7, 2011
Bill Levine August 7, 2011Eloquently expressed and horrifically accurate, this excellent analysis articulates the frustration that so many of us have felt watching Mr...
AnAverageAmerican August 7, 2011Very well put. I know that I have been going through Kübler-Ross's stages of grief ever since the foxes (a.k.a. Geithner and Summers) were...
cdearman Santa Fe, NM August 7, 2011"In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it,...
SP California August 7, 2011Unfortunately, the Democratic Congress of 2008-2010, did not have the will to make the economic and social program decisions that would have improved the economic situation for the middle-class; and it is becoming more obvious that President Obama does not have the temperament to publicly push for programs and policies that he wants the congress to enact.
The American people have a problem: we reelect Obama and hope for the best; or we elect a Republican and expect the worst. There is no question that the Health Care law that was just passed would be reversed; Medicare and Medicare would be gutted; and who knows what would happen to Social Security. You can be sure, though, that business taxes and regulation reforms would not be in the cards and those regulations that have been enacted would be reversed. We have traveled this road before and we should be wise enough not to travel it again!farospace san francisco August 7, 2011Brilliant analysis - and I suspect that a very large number of those who voted for President Obama will recognize in this the thoughts that they have been trying to ignore, or have been trying not to say out loud. Later historians can complete this analysis and attempt to explain exactly why Mr. Obama has turned out the way he has - but right now, it may be time to ask a more relevant and urgent question.
If it is not too late, will a challenger emerge in time before the 2012 elections, or will we be doomed to hold our noses and endure another four years of this?
Richard Katz American in Oxford, UK August 7, 2011Very eloquent and exactly to the point. Like many others, I was enthralled by the rhetoric of his story, making the leap of faith (or hope) that because he could tell his story so well, he could tell, as you put it, "the story the American people were waiting to hear."
Disappointment has darkened into disillusion, disillusion into a species of despair. Will I vote for Barack Obama again? What are the options?
An Ordinary American Prague August 7, 2011This is the most brilliant and tragic story I have read in a long time---in fact, precisely since I read when Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt. When will a leader emerge with a true moral vision for the federal government and for our country? Someone who sees government as a balance to capitalism, and a means to achieve the social and economic justice that we (yes, we) believe in? Will that leadership arrive before parts of America come to look like the dystopia of Johannesburg?
We (yes, we) recognise that capitalism is the most efficient way to maximise overall prosperity and quality of life. But we also recognise that unfettered, it will ravage the environment, abuse labor, and expand income disparity until violence or tragedy (or both) ensues.
These are the lessons we've learned since the industrial revolution, and they're the ones that we should be drawing from the past decade. We recognise that we need a strong federal government to check these tendencies, and to strike a stable, sustainable balance between prosperity, community, opportunity, wealth, justice, freedom. We need a voice to fill the moral vacuum that has allowed the Koch/Tea/Fox Party to emerge and grab power.
Americans know this---including, of course, President Obama (see his April 13 speech at GW University). But as this article by Dr. Westen so effectively shows, Obama is incompetent to lead us back to America's traditional position on the global economic/political spectrum. He's brilliant and eloquent. He's achieved personal success that is inspirational. He's done some good things as president. But he is not competent to lead us back to a state of American morality, where government is the protector of those who work hard, and the provider of opportunity to all Americans.
Taxes, subsidies, entitlements, laws... these are the tools we have available to achieve our national moral vision. But the vision has been muddled (hijacked?) and that is our biggest problem. -->
martin Portland, Oregon August 7, 2011I voted for Obama. I thought then, and still think, he's a decent person, a smart person, a person who wants to do the best he can for others. When I voted for him, I was thinking he's a centrist who will find a way to unite our increasingly polarized and ugly politics in the USA. Or if not unite us, at least forge a way to get some important things done despite the ugly polarization.
And I must confess, I have been disappointed. Deeply so. He has not united us. He has not forged a way to accomplish what needs to be done. He has not been a leader.
I've heard him called a mediator, a conciliator, a compromiser, etc. Those terms indicate someone who is bringing divergent views together and moving us along. That's part of what a leader does, though not all. Yet I don't think he's even lived up to his reputation as a mediator.
Almost three years after I voted for Obama, I still don't know what he's doing other than trying to help the financial industry: the wealthy who benefit most from it and the technocrats who run it for them. But average working people, people like myself and my daughter and my grandson, have not been helped. We are worse off than before. And millions of unemployed and underemployed are even worse off than my family is.
So whatever else he is (and that still remains a mystery to me), President Obama is not the leader I thought I was voting for. Which leaves me feeling confused and close to apathetic about what to do as a voter in 2012. More of the same isn't worth voting for. Yet I don't see anyone out there who offers the possibility of doing better.
This was an extraordinarily well written, eloquent and comprehensive indictment of the failure of the Obama presidency.
If a credible primary challenger to Obama ever could arise, the positions and analysis in this column would be all he or she would need to justify the Democratic party's need to seek new leadership.
I knew that Obama was a charade early on when giving a speech about the banking failures to the nation, instead of giving the narrative Mr. Westen accurately recommended on the origins of the orgy of greed that just crippled our economy and caused suffering for millions of Americans, he said "we don't disparage wealth in America." I was dumbfounded.
He should have been condemning the craven, wanton, greed of nihilistic financial gangsters who hijacked our economy. Instead he seemed to be calling for all Americans not to hate rich people. That was not the point. Americans don't hate rich people, but they should hate rich people who acquire their wealth at the expense of the well being of an entire nation through irresponsible, avaricious, and in some instances illegal practices, and legally bribe politicians to enact laws which allow them to run amok over our economy without supervision or regulation.
I knew then that Obama was either a political lemon, in over his head, an extremely conflict averse neurotic individual with a compulsive need for some delusional ideal of neutrality in political and social relations, or a political phony beholden to the same forces that almost destroyed the country as Republicans are.
Perhaps all of these are true.
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Dec 29, 2016 | economistsview.typepad.com
sanjait -> DeDude... , December 28, 2016 at 06:26 PM"Russia tampered with vote tallies to help Donald Trump"likbez -> sanjait... December 28, 2016 at 09:40 PM , 2016 at 09:40 PMYeah, that seems like a clear statement, but when you consider that the vast majority of people do not habitually read closely and interpret things literally, I can see how this would easily be misinterpreted.
Russia tampered with the election to help Donald Trump. That's a fairly well established fact. It's not the same as "tampered with vote tallies" but an inattentive poll respondent might assume the question was about the former. And most people are inattentive.
Sanjait,"Russia tampered with the election to help Donald Trump. That's a fairly well established fact."
You are funny. Especially with your "well established fact" nonsense.
In such cases the only source of well established facts is a court of law or International observers of the elections. All other agencies have their own interest in distorting the truth. For example, to get additional funding.
And that list includes President Obama himself, as a player, because he clearly was a Hillary supporter and as such can not be considered an impartial player and can politically benefit from shifting the blame for fiasco to Russia.
Also historically, he never was very truthful with American people, was he? As in case of his
"Change we can believe in!" bait and switch trick.There were several other important foreign players in the US elections: for example KAS and Israel. Were their actions investigated? Especially in the area of financial support of candidates.
And then FYI there is a documented history of US tampering in Russian Presidential election of 2011-2012 such as meetings of the US ambassador with the opposition leaders, financing of opposition via NGO, putting pressure by publishing election pools produced by US financed non-profits, and so on and so forth. All in the name of democracy, of course. Which cost Ambassador McFaul his position; NED was kicked out of the country.
As far as I remember nobody went to jail in the USA for those activities. There was no investigation. So it looks like the USA authorities considered this to be a pretty legal activity. Then why they complain now?
And then there is the whole rich history of CIA subverting elections in Latin America.
So is not this a case of "the pot calling the kettle black"?
I don't know. But I would avoid your simplistic position. The case is too complex for this.
At least more complex that the narrative the neoliberal MSMs try to present us with. It might be Russian influence was a factor, but it might be that it was negligible and other factors were in play. There is also a pre-history and there are other suspects.
You probably need to see a wider context of the event.
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Dec 27, 2016 | economistsview.typepad.com
Fred C. Dobbs -> Peter K.... December 26, 2016 at 07:15 AM neopopulism: A cultural and political movement, mainly in Latin American countries, distinct from twentieth-century populism in radically combining classically opposed left-wing and right-wing attitudes and using electronic media as a means of dissemination. (Wiktionary)
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Dec 23, 2016 | economistsview.typepad.com
"Trump_vs_deep_state ... is anything but populist":Populism, Real and Phony, by Paul Krugman, NY Times : Authoritarians with an animus against ethnic minorities are on the march across the Western world. ... But what should we call these groups? Many reporters are using the term "populist," which seems both inadequate and misleading..., are the other shared features of this movement - addiction to conspiracy theories, indifference to the rule of law, a penchant for punishing critics - really captured by the "populist" label?ilsm : , December 23, 2016 at 10:45 AMStill, the European members of this emerging alliance - an axis of evil? - have offered some real benefits to workers. ... Trump_vs_deep_state is, however, different..., the emerging policy agenda is anything but populist.
All indications are that we're looking at huge windfalls for billionaires combined with savage cuts in programs that serve not just the poor but also the middle class. And the white working class, which provided much of the 46 percent Trump vote share, is shaping up as the biggest loser. ...
Both his pick as budget director and his choice to head Health and Human Services want to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and privatize Medicare. His choice as labor secretary is a fast-food tycoon who has been a vociferous opponent both of Obamacare and of minimum wage hikes. And House Republicans have already submitted plans for drastic cuts in Social Security, including a sharp rise in the retirement age. ...
In other words..., European populism is at least partly real, while Trumpist populism is turning out to be entirely fake, a scam sold to working-class voters who are in for a rude awakening. Will the new regime pay a political price?
Well, don't count on it..., you know that there will be huge efforts to shift the blame. These will include claims that the collapse of health care is really President Obama's fault; claims that the failure of alternatives is somehow the fault of recalcitrant Democrats; and an endless series of attempts to distract the public.
Expect more Carrier-style stunts that don't actually help workers but dominate a news cycle. Expect lots of fulmination against minorities. And it's worth remembering what authoritarian regimes traditionally do to shift attention from failing policies, namely, find some foreigners to confront. Maybe it will be a trade war with China, maybe something worse.
Opponents need to do all they can to defeat such strategies of distraction. Above all, they shouldn't let themselves be sucked into cooperation that leaves them sharing part of the blame. The perpetrators of this scam should be forced to own it.
The Clinton brand of nato-neocon-neolib is way ahead of the populist nativist in tilting toward Armageddon.DeDude -> Gibbon1... , December 23, 2016 at 02:33 PMOwn the world for the banksters.
poor pk
It really depend on how the two sides play it out. You don't need to move the diehard sexists and racists for things to change. But the Democrats need to have a Warren/Sanders attack team ready on every single GOP "favor the rich and screw the rest" proposal. It would be rather easy to get the press to pay attention to those two if they went to war with Trump/GOP. Their following is sufficiently large to be a media market - so their comments would not be ignored. We also know that at least Warren knows how to bait Trump into saying something stupid so you can get the kind of firework that commercial media cannot ignore. The Dems need to learn how to bait the media at least as effectively as Trump does.Tim Cahill : , -1When can we please start tuning Krugman down here? He aided and abetted the election disaster by being one of the most prominent Very Serious People leading the offensive against Sanders and promoting a fatally flawed candidate that was beaten resoundingly in 2008 and with irredeemable, self-inflicted, negative baggage.Tim Cahill -> pgl... , December 23, 2016 at 11:17 AMHe may make good points here after-the-fact, but they're all "duh!" level bits of analysis at this stage. And the last thing I want to hear from any of the VSPs who piloted the train over the cliff during this election season is b*tching about the mess at the bottom of the cliff.
Aren't there ANY other voices with some remaining shred of political credibility that can be quoted here instead of the unabashed VSPs who helped elect trump?
Since I am only noting objection to one blogger who invested much of his personal credibility into promoting a horrible leader, I don't see the relevance of your comment at all. I enjoy pretty much every other blogger to which Thoma links.yuan -> sanjait... , December 23, 2016 at 12:03 PMMy issue is with highlighting a crank whose writing has cratered over the last year. If a Trump ripping is due (and it usually is), then I'm fine with it being a feature so long as it's written by someone who isn't channeling Niall Ferguson and with the same degree of credibility as a political "wonk".
I think a certain amount of self-criticism and introspection is warranted at this point, no? And, I think, there is little question that the long-term coziness of the democratic party with high finance and the PMIC played a major role in negative perceptions of HRC.ilsm -> sanjait... , December 23, 2016 at 01:04 PMAlthough I did not vote for Clinton, if I had lived in a remotely competitive state I would have certainly voted for her. To put this in perspective, my vote for Sanders was a very reluctant vote and Clinton is the POTUS I despise the most (Trump will change this).
As Lincoln may have observed: you* can fool too many of the democrats all the time.yuan -> Tim Cahill ... , December 23, 2016 at 11:57 AMone Obama, two Clintons .........
Vapid talking points, like fast and loose with felonies.
She had no convictions bc justice was ordered to do the job of juries.
"beaten resoundingly in 2008 and with irredeemable, self-inflicted, negative baggage."Peter K. -> Tim Cahill ... , December 23, 2016 at 01:08 PMCharacterizing Clinton's electoral college defeat as being beaten resoundingly is exactly the kind of irrational "bro" rhetoric that Krugman rightly criticized.
And I write this as someone who voted for Sanders and then Stein.
As you can tell there a few people here who agreed with Krugman during the primary and agree with him now.Tim Cahill -> Peter K.... , December 23, 2016 at 01:46 PMI agree with you in general, but am going to try to ignore the insulters and haters and link to good thinkers.
They're an angry lot.... and they, like the conservative "affinity fraudsters" that Krugman has lambasted over the years, refuse to accept reality. Instead, they hunker down, shut out facts, and surround themselves only with people and information that agrees with their flawed opinions.Denis Drew : , December 23, 2016 at 11:03 AMAll I hear from Paul -- and others -- sounds like ducking and weaving and back peddling -- in a phrase: retreat-in-good-order to avoid defeat-in-detail.Denis Drew -> anne... , December 23, 2016 at 01:07 PMHow about a little aggression? Would it be too much to expect these top brains the potential to rebuild labor union density (THE ONLY POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC TISSUE OF THE AVERAGE PERSON) at state by progressive state level.
NEVER HEAR OF IT -- NO OTHER PATH (and it looks to be multi-multi-path once you start looking through all the angles.
So I wont be accused of hi-jacking the thread with a very long unionization entreaty you can look up my entreaty here:
Wet backs and narrow backs (Irish immigrants' native born kiddies)
http://ontodayspage.blogspot.com/2016/12/wet-backs-and-narrow-backs-irish.htmlI'm only beginning to sort all this out -- like the angle that any group disallowed of employee status by the Trump NLRB (student teaching and research assistants?) immediately become eligible for full state supported conduction of NLRB-like certification process. No preemption problem.
Preemption on closer exam may not be the barrier folks think. So, so much more federal preemption/supremacy (not the same thing!) stuff to sort through -- another reason to put off posting the full comment. Few weeks maybe.
Where I come from, the Bronx of the 50s-70s, everybody was different, so nobody was different, so we had more fun with your differences.We didn't have diversity; we had assimilation; everyone was the same.
Typical 60s high school chatter: How's an Italian like a crashing airplane? Guinea, Guinea, Guinea: Whop!
How's an Irishman like a submarine under attack? Down the hatch; down the hatch; down the hatch!In the movie The Wanderers, portraying the 1979 Bronx with more people of color, the high school teasing is all: nigger, spic, kike! Too much for your non-real-melting pot ears.
:-)-
********************
Be more impressed by your (plural) interest in minority dignity if it obsessed on getting everyone one the same ECONOMIC (!) level.Click here -- for early thoughts (still sorting) on how to actually do just that -- if you really want to really help:
http://ontodayspage.blogspot.com/2016/12/wet-backs-and-narrow-backs-irish.htmlYou rebuild union density or you do nothing! You do it at the state by progressive state level or you do nothing! Are you academic progressives the slightest bit interested in doing just that? How come you are not obsessed with re-unionization?
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Dec 17, 2016 | economistsview.typepad.com
Monetas Tuas Requiro -> kthomas... , December 16, 2016 at 05:10 PMThe secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin winJohnH -> Dan Kervick... , December 16, 2016 at 11:46 AMhttp://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html
PK seems to be a bitter old man...anne -> sanjait... , December 16, 2016 at 03:08 PMNothing to see here, say the useful idiots.anne -> anne... , December 16, 2016 at 03:15 PM[ I find it terrifying, simply terrifying, to refer to people as "useful idiots" after all the personal destruction that has followed when the expression was specifically used in the past.
To me, using such an expression is an honored economist intent on becoming Joseph McCarthy. ]
To demean a person as though the person were a communist or a fool of communists or the like, with all the personal harm that has historically brought in this country, is cruel beyond my understanding or imagining.Necesito Dinero Tuyo -> anne... , December 16, 2016 at 05:25 PM"Useful Idiots Galore," terrifying.
Dale : , December 16, 2016 at 10:51 AMtrouble is that his mind reflects an accurate perception of our common reality.Procopius -> Dale... , December 17, 2016 at 02:37 AMWell, not really. For example he referred to "the close relationship between Wikileaks and Russian intelligence." But Wikileaks is a channel. They don't seek out material. They rely on people to bring material to them. They supposedly make an effort to verify that the material is not a forgery, but aside from that what they release is what people bring to them. Incidentally, like so many people you seem to not care whether the material is accurate or not -- Podesta and the DNC have not claimed that any of the emails are different from what they sent.Tom aka Rusty : , December 16, 2016 at 11:06 AMPK's head explodes!Ben Groves -> Tom aka Rusty... , December 16, 2016 at 11:07 AMOne thought....
When politicians and business executives and economists cuddle up to the totalitarian Chinese it is viewed as an act of enlightment and progress.
When someone cuddles up to the authoritarian thug Putin it is an act of evil.
Seems a bit of a double standard.
We are going to have to do "business" with both the Chinese and the Russians, whoever is president.
Your head should explode considering Trump's deal with the "establishment" in July was brokered by foreign agents.ilsm -> Ben Groves... , December 16, 2016 at 04:11 PMcuriouser and curiouser! while Obama and administration arm jihadis and call its support for jihadis funded by al Qaeda a side in a civil war.Tom aka Rusty -> kthomas... , December 16, 2016 at 01:36 PMthe looking glass you all went through.
Trump has more convictions than any democrat
... ... ...
In a theatre of the absurd sort of way.dilbert dogbert -> Tom aka Rusty... , December 16, 2016 at 12:11 PMOne thought:anne -> sanjait... , December 16, 2016 at 03:22 PM
Only Nixon can go to China.anne -> anne... , December 16, 2016 at 03:23 PMPutin is a murderous thug...http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/opinion/david-brooks-snap-out-of-it.html
September 22, 2014
Snap Out of It
By David BrooksPresident Vladimir Putin of Russia, a lone thug sitting atop a failing regime....
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/22/opinion/thomas-friedman-putin-and-the-pope.html
October 21, 2014
Putin and the Pope
By Thomas L. FriedmanOne keeps surprising us with his capacity for empathy, the other by how much he has become a first-class jerk and thug....
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/opinion/sunday/thomas-l-friedman-whos-playing-marbles-now.html
December 20, 2014
Who's Playing Marbles Now?
By Thomas L. FriedmanLet us not mince words: Vladimir Putin is a delusional thug....
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/opinion/paul-krugman-putin-neocons-and-the-great-illusion.html
December 21, 2014
Conquest Is for Losers: Putin, Neocons and the Great Illusion
By Paul KrugmanRemember, he's an ex-K.G.B. man - which is to say, he spent his formative years as a professional thug....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/opinion/thomas-friedman-czar-putins-next-moves.html
January 27, 2015
Czar Putin's Next Moves
By Thomas L. FriedmanZURICH - If Putin the Thug gets away with crushing Ukraine's new democratic experiment and unilaterally redrawing the borders of Europe, every pro-Western country around Russia will be in danger....
Gibbon1 -> anne... , December 16, 2016 at 07:15 PMPutin is a murderous thug...September 15, 2015
Obama Weighing Talks With Putin on Syrian Crisis
By PETER BAKER and ANDREW E. KRAMERWASHINGTON - Mr. Obama views Mr. Putin as a thug, according to advisers and analysts....
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/opinion/mr-putins-mixed-messages-on-syria.html
September 20, 2015
Mr. Putin's Mixed Messages on Syria
Mr. Obama considers Mr. Putin a thug, his advisers say....
> By David BrooksSandwichman : , December 16, 2016 at 11:06 AM
> By Thomas L. Friedman
> By Paul Krugman
> By Peter Baker and Andrew E. KramerI feel these authors have intentionally attempted to mislead in the past. They also studiously ignore the United States thuggish foreign policy.
"...not acting as if this was a normal election..." The problem is that it WAS a "normal" U.S. election.Ben Groves -> Sandwichman ... , December 16, 2016 at 11:09 AMYup, like the other elections, the bases stayed solvent and current events factored into the turnout and voting patterns which spurred the independent vote.Gibbon1 -> Ben Groves... , December 16, 2016 at 11:57 AMWhen people were claiming Clinton was going to win big, I thought no Republican and Democratic voters are going to pull the lever like a trained monkey as usual. Only difference in this election was Hillary's huge negatives due entirely by her and Bill Clinton's support for moving manufacturing jobs to Mexico and China in the 90s.dilbert dogbert -> Sandwichman ... , December 16, 2016 at 12:13 PM
I would have thought in a "normal" murika and election, the drumpf would have gotten at most 10 million votes.Sandwichman -> dilbert dogbert... , December 16, 2016 at 01:54 PMThe trouble with normal is it always gets worse.Fred C. Dobbs : , December 16, 2016 at 11:08 AMTo Understand Trump, Learn Russian http://nyti.ms/2hLcrB1Fred C. Dobbs -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 16, 2016 at 11:25 AM
NYT - Andrew Rosenthal - December 15The Russian language has two words for truth - a linguistic quirk that seems relevant to our current political climate, especially because of all the disturbing ties between the newly elected president and the Kremlin.
The word for truth in Russian that most Americans know is "pravda" - the truth that seems evident on the surface. It's subjective and infinitely malleable, which is why the Soviet Communists called their party newspaper "Pravda." Despots, autocrats and other cynical politicians are adept at manipulating pravda to their own ends.
But the real truth, the underlying, cosmic, unshakable truth of things is called "istina" in Russian. You can fiddle with the pravda all you want, but you can't change the istina.
For the Trump team, the pravda of the 2016 election is that not all Trump voters are explicitly racist. But the istina of the 2016 campaign is that Trump's base was heavily dependent on racists and xenophobes, Trump basked in and stoked their anger and hatred, and all those who voted for him cast a ballot for a man they knew to be a racist, sexist xenophobe. That was an act of racism.
Trump's team took to Twitter with lightning speed recently to sneer at the conclusion by all 17 intelligence agencies that the Kremlin hacked Democratic Party emails for the specific purpose of helping Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton. Trump said the intelligence agencies got it wrong about Iraq, and that someone else could have been responsible for the hack and that the Democrats were just finding another excuse for losing.
The istina of this mess is that powerful evidence suggests that the Russians set out to interfere in American politics, and that Trump, with his rejection of Western European alliances and embrace of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, was their chosen candidate.
The pravda of Trump's selection of Rex Tillerson, head of Exxon Mobil, as secretary of state is that by choosing an oil baron who has made billions for his company by collaborating with Russia, Trump will make American foreign policy beholden to American corporate interests.
That's bad enough, but the istina is far worse. For one thing, American foreign policy has been in thrall to American corporate interests since, well, since there were American corporations. Just look at the mess this country created in Latin America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and the Middle East to serve American companies.
Yes, Tillerson has ignored American interests repeatedly, including in Russia and Iraq, and has been trying to remove sanctions imposed after Russia's seizure of Crimea because they interfered with one of his many business deals. But take him out of the equation in the Trump cabinet and nothing changes. Trump has made it plain, with every action he takes, that he is going to put every facet of policy, domestic and foreign, at the service of corporate America. The istina here is that Tillerson is just a symptom of a much bigger problem.
The pravda is that Trump was right in saying that the intelligence agencies got it wrong about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.
But the istina is that Trump's contempt for the intelligence services is profound and dangerous. He's not getting daily intelligence briefings anymore, apparently because they are just too dull to hold his attention.
And now we know that Condoleezza Rice was instrumental in bringing Tillerson to Trump's attention. As national security adviser and then secretary of state for president George W. Bush, Rice was not just wrong about Iraq, she helped fabricate the story that Hussein had nuclear weapons.
Trump and Tillerson clearly think they are a match for the wily and infinitely dangerous Putin, but as they move foward with their plan to collaborate with Russia instead of opposing its imperialist tendencies, they might keep in mind another Russian saying, this one from Lenin.
"There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience," he wrote. "A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel."
Putin has that philosophy hard-wired into his political soul. When it comes to using scoundrels to get what he wants, he is a professional, and Trump is only an amateur. That is the istina of the matter.
If nothing else, Russia - with a notably un-free press - has shrewdly used our own 'free press' against US.DeDude -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 16, 2016 at 11:33 AMRUSSIA'S UNFREE PRESS
The Boston Globe - Marshall Goldman - January 29, 2001
AS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION DEBATES ITS POLICY TOWARD RUSSIA, FREEDOM OF THE PRESS SHOULD BE ONE OF ITS MAJOR CONCERNS. UNDER PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN THE PRESS IS FREE ONLY AS LONG AS IT DOES NOT CRITICIZE PUTIN OR HIS POLICIES. WHEN NTV, THE TELEVISION NETWORK OF THE MEDIA GIANT MEDIA MOST, REFUSED TO PULL ITS PUNCHES, MEDIA MOST'S OWNER, VLADIMIR GUSINSKY, FOUND HIMSELF IN JAIL, AND GAZPROM, A COMPANY DOMINATED BY THE STATE, BEGAN TO CALL IN LOANS TO MEDIA MOST. Unfortunately, Putin's actions are applauded by more than 70 percent of the Russian people. They crave a strong and forceful leader; his KGB past and conditioned KGB responses are just what they seem to want after what many regard as the social, political, and economic chaos of the last decade.
But what to the Russians is law and order (the "dictatorship of the law," as Putin has so accurately put it) looks more and more like an old Soviet clampdown to many Western observers.
There is no complaint about Putin's promises. He tells everyone he wants freedom of the press. But in the context of his KGB heritage, his notion of freedom of the press is something very different. In an interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail, he said that that press freedom excludes the "hooliganism" or "uncivilized" reporting he has to deal with in Moscow. By that he means criticism, especially of his conduct of the war in Chechnya, his belated response to the sinking of the Kursk, and the heavy-handed way in which he has pushed aside candidates for governor in regional elections if they are not to Putin's liking.
He does not take well to criticism. When asked by the relatives of those lost in the Kursk why he seemed so unresponsive, Putin tried to shift the blame for the disaster onto the media barons, or at least those who had criticized him. They were the ones, he insisted, who had pressed for reduced funding for the Navy while they were building villas in Spain and France. As for their criticism of his behavior, They lie! They lie! They lie!
Our Western press has provided good coverage of the dogged way Putin and his aides have tried to muscle Gusinsky out of the Media Most press conglomerate he created. But those on the Putin enemies list now include even Boris Berezovsky, originally one of Putin's most enthusiastic promoters who after the sinking of the Kursk also became a critic and thus an opponent.
Gusinsky would have a hard time winning a merit badge for trustworthiness (Berezovsky shouldn't even apply), but in the late Yeltsin and Putin years, Gusinsky has earned enormous credit for his consistently objective news coverage, including a spotlight on malfeasance at the very top. More than that, he has supported his programmers when they have subjected Yeltsin and now Putin to bitter satire on Kukly, his Sunday evening prime-time puppet show.
What we hear less of, though, is what is happening to individual reporters, especially those engaged in investigative work. Almost monthly now there are cases of violence and intimidation. Among those brutalized since Putin assumed power are a reporter for Radio Liberty who dared to write negative reports about the Russian Army's role in Chechnia and four reporters for Novaya Gazeta. Two of them were investigating misdeeds by the FSB (today's equivalent of the KGB), including the possibility that it rather than Chechins had blown up a series of apartment buildings. Another was pursuing reports of money-laundering by Yeltsin family members and senior staff in Switzerland. Although these journalists were very much in the public eye, they were all physically assaulted.
Those working for provincial papers labor under even more pressure with less visibility. There are numerous instances where regional bosses such as the governor of Vladivostok operate as little dictators, and as a growing number of journalists have discovered, challenges are met with threats, physical intimidation, and, if need be, murder.
True, freedom of the press in Russia is still less than 15 years old, and not all the country's journalists or their bosses have always used that freedom responsibly. During the 1996 election campaign, for example, the media owners, including Gusinsky conspired to denigrate or ignore every viable candidate other than Yeltsin. But attempts to muffle if not silence criticism have multiplied since Putin and his fellow KGB veterans have come to power. Criticism from any source, be it an individual journalist or a corporate entity, invites retaliation.
When Media Most persisted in its criticism, Putin sat by approvingly as his subordinates sent in masked and armed tax police and prosecutors. When that didn't work, they jailed Gusinsky on charges that were later dropped, although they are seeking to extradite and jail him again. along with his treasurer, on a new set of charges. Yesterday the prosecutor general summoned Tatyana Mitkova, the anchor of NTV's evening news program, for questioning. Putin's aides are also doing all they can to prevent Gusinsky from refinancing his debt-ridden operation with Ted Turner or anyone else in or outside of the country.
According to one report, Putin told one official, You deal with the shares, debts, and management and I will deal with the journalists. His goal simply is to end to independent TV coverage in Russia. ...
(No link; from their archives.)
"Unfortunately, Putin's actions are applauded by more than 70 percent of the Russian people"anne -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 16, 2016 at 11:45 AMExactly; the majority of people are so stupid and/or lazy that they cannot be bothered understanding what is going on; and how their hard won democracy is being subjugated. But thank God that is in Russia not here in the US - right?
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-2001-02-07/html/CREC-2001-02-07-pt1-PgE133-4.htmWatermelonpunch -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 16, 2016 at 04:55 PMFebruary 7, 2001
Russia's Unfree Press
By Marshall I. Goldman"Infinitely dangerous" As in the event horizon of a black hole, for pity's sake?cm -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 17, 2016 at 03:42 PMOdd choice of words. Should there have been a "more" in between there? Was it a typo?
"Pravda" is etymologically derived from "prav-" which means "right" (as opposed to "left", other connotations are "proper", "correct", "rightful", also legal right). It designates the social-construct aspect of "righteousness/truthfulness/correctness" as opposed to "objective reality" (conceptually independent of social standards, in reality anything but). In formal logic, "istina" is used to designate truth. Logical falsity is designated a "lie".Ben Groves : , December 16, 2016 at 11:18 AMIt is a feature common to most European languages that rightfulness, righteousness, correctness, and legal rights are identified with the designation for the right side. "Sinister" is Latin for "left".
If you believe 911 was a Zionist conspiracy, so where the Paris attacks of November 2015, when Trump was failing in the polls as the race was moving toward as you would expect, toward other candidates. After the Paris attacks, his numbers reaccelerated.cm -> sanjait... , December 17, 2016 at 03:46 PMIf "ZOG" created the "false flag" of the Paris attacks to start a anti-Muslim fervor, they succeeded, much like 911. Bastille day attacks were likewise, a false flag. This is not new, this goes back to when the aristocracy merged with the merchant caste, creating the "bourgeois". They have been running a parallel government in the shadows to effect what is seen.
There used to be something called Usenet News, where at the protocol level reader software could fetch meta data (headers containing author, (stated) origin, title, etc.) independently from comment bodies. This was largely owed to limited download bandwidth. Basically all readers had "kill files" i.e. filters where one could configure that comments with certain header parameters should not be downloaded, or even hidden.cm -> cm... , December 17, 2016 at 03:48 PMThe main application was that the reader would download comments in the background when headers were already shown, or on demand when you open a comment.tew : , December 16, 2016 at 11:19 AMNow you get the whole thing (or in units of 100) by the megabyte.
A major problem is signal extraction out of the massive amounts of noise generated by the media, social media, parties, and pundits.Ben Groves -> DeDude... , December 16, 2016 at 11:34 AMIt's easy enough to highlight this thread of information here, but in real time people are being bombarded by so many other stories.
In particular, the Clinton Foundation was also regularly being highlighted for its questionable ties to foreign influence. And HRC's extravagant ties to Wall St. And so much more.
And there is outrage fatigue.
The media's job was to sell Trump and denounce Clinton. The mistake a lot of people make is thinking the global elite are the "status quo". They are not. They are generally the ones that break the status quo more often than not.cm -> DeDude... , December 17, 2016 at 03:55 PMThe bulk of them wanted Trump/Republican President and made damn sure it was President. Buffering the campaign against criticism while overly focusing on Clinton's "crap". It took away from the issues which of course would have low key'd the election.
Not much bullying has to be applied when there are "economic incentives". The media attention economy and ratings system thrive on controversy and emotional engagement. This was known a century ago as "only bad news is good news". As long as I have lived, the non-commercial media not subject (or not as much) to these dynamics have always been perceived as dry and boring.Jim Harrison : , December 16, 2016 at 11:24 AMI heard from a number of people that they followed the campaign "coverage" (in particular Trump) as gossip/entertainment, and those were people who had no sympathies for him. And even media coverage by outlets generally critical of Trump's unbelievable scandals and outrageous performances catered to this sentiment.
Shorter Paul Krugman: nobody acted more irresponsibly in the last election than the New York Times.Sandwichman -> Jim Harrison ... , December 16, 2016 at 11:53 AMLooks like Putin recruited the NYT, the FBI and the DNC.DrDick -> Sandwichman ... , December 16, 2016 at 11:57 AMNah, Wall Street and the GOP recruited them to the effort.Sandwichman -> DrDick... , December 16, 2016 at 01:57 PMGOP included in FBI. Wall Street included in DNC, GOP. It's all just one big FBIDNCGOPCNNWSNYT.sanjait -> Jim Harrison ... , December 16, 2016 at 03:06 PMHe can't say it out loud but you know he's including the NYT on his list of UIs.tew : , December 16, 2016 at 11:26 AMLet me also add some levelheaded thoughts:DrDick -> tew... , December 16, 2016 at 11:56 AMFirst, let me disclose that I detest TRUMP and that the Russian meddling has me deeply concerned. Yet...
We only have assertions that the Russian hacking had some influence. We do not know whether it likely had *material* influence that could have reasonably led to a swing state(s) going to TRUMP that otherwise would have gone to HRC.
Dr. Krugman is feeding this "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. He comes across as increasingly shrill and even unhinged - it's a slide he's been taking for years IMO, which is a big shame.
It is downright irresponsible and dangerous for a major public intellectual with so little information to cast the shadow of legitimacy on a president ("And it means not acting as if this was a normal election whose result gives the winner any kind of a mandate, or indeed any legitimacy beyond the bare legal requirements.") This kind of behavior is EXACTLY what TRUMP and other authoritarians exhibit - using pieces of information to discredit institutions and individuals. Since foreign governments have and will continue to try to influence U.S. policy through increasingly sophisticated means, this opens the door for anyone to declare our elections and policies as illegitimate in the future.
It is quite clear that the Russians intervened on Trump's behalf and that this intervention had an impact. The problem is that we cannot actually quantify that impact.Sandwichman -> tew... , December 16, 2016 at 01:17 PM"We only have assertions that the Russian hacking had some influence."cm -> Sandwichman ... , December 17, 2016 at 04:00 PMAny influence Russian hacking had was entirely a consequence of U.S. media obsession with celebrity, gotcha and horse race trivia and two-party red state/blue state tribalism.
Without the preceding, neither Trump nor Clinton would have been contenders in the first place. Putin didn't invent super delegates, Citizens United, Fox News, talk radio, Goldman-Sachs, etc. etc. etc. If Putin exploited vulnerabilities, it is because preserving those vulnerabilities was more important to the elites than fostering a democratic political culture.
But this is how influence is exerted - by using the dynamics of the adversary's/targets organization as an amplifier. Hierarchical organizations are approached through their management or oversight bodies, social networks through key influencers, etc.David : , December 16, 2016 at 11:58 AMI see this so much and it's so right wing cheap: I hate Trump, but assertions that Russia intervened are unproven.sglover -> David... , December 16, 2016 at 02:50 PMFirst, Trump openly invited Russia to hack DNC emails. That is on its face treason and sedition. It's freaking on video. If HRC did that there would be calls of the right for her execution.
Second, a NYT story showed that the FBI knew about the hacking but did not alert the DNC properly - they didn't even show up, they sent a note to a help desk.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fbi-probe-dnc-hacked-emails_us_57a19f22e4b08a8e8b601259
This was a serious national security breach that was not addressed properly. This is criminal negligence.
This was a hacked election by collusion of the FBI and the Russian hackers and it totally discredits the FBI as it throwed out chum and then denied at the last minute. Now the CIA comes in and says PUTIN, Trump's bff, was directly involved in manipulating the timetable that the hacked emails were released in drip drip form to cater to the media - creating story after story about emails.
It was a perfect storm for a coup. Putin played us. And he will play Trump. And God knows how it ends. But it doesn't matter b/c we're all screwed with climate change anyway.
"It was a perfect storm for a coup. Putin played us. And he will play Trump. And God knows how it ends. But it doesn't matter b/c we're all screwed with climate change anyway."100panthers : , December 16, 2016 at 02:17 PMIt's not a "coup". It's an election result that didn't go the way a lot of people want. That's it. It's probably not optimal, but I'm pretty sure that democracy isn't supposed to produce optimal results.
All this talk about "coups" and "illegitimacy" is nuts, and -- true to Dem practice -- incredibly short-sighted. For many, voting for Trump was an available way to say to those people, "We don't believe you any more. At all." Seen in that light, it is a profoundly democratic (small 'd') response to elites that have most consistently served only themselves.
Trump and his gang will be deeply grateful if the left follows Krugman's "wisdom", and clings to his ever-changing excuses. (I thought it was the evil Greens who deprived Clinton of her due?)
Post Truth is Pre-Fascism. The party that thinks your loyalty is suspect unless you wear a flag pin fuels itself on Post Truth. Isnt't this absurdity the gist of Obama's Russia comments today!?!ilsm -> 100panthers... , December 16, 2016 at 04:29 PMObama and the Clintons are angered; Russia keeping US from giving Syria to al Qaeda. Like Clinton gave them Libya.Jerry Brown -> sanjait... , December 16, 2016 at 04:46 PMI agree. Unless the Russians or someone else hacked the ballot box machines, it is our own damn fault.ilsm : , December 16, 2016 at 04:27 PMthe US media is angered putin is killing US' jihadis in SyriaMr. Bill : , December 16, 2016 at 08:27 PM"On Wednesday an editorial in The Times described Donald Trump as a "useful idiot" serving Russian interests." I think that is beyond the pale. Yes, I realize that Adolph Hitler was democratically elected. I agree that Trump seems like a scary monster under the bed. That doesn't mean we have too pee our pants, Paul. He's a bully, tough guy, maybe, the kind of kid that tortured you before you kicked the shit out of them with your brilliance. That's not what is needed now.Mr. Bill -> Mr. Bill... , December 16, 2016 at 08:39 PMWhat really is needed, is a watchdog, like Dean Baker, that alerts we dolts of pending bills and their ramifications. The ship of neo-liberal trade bullshit has sailed. Hell, you don't believe it yourself, you've said as much. Be gracious, and tell the truth. We can handle it.Ben Groves -> Mr. Bill... , December 16, 2016 at 09:51 PMThe ship of neo-liberal trade sailed in the mid-2000's. That you don't get that is sad. You can only milk that so far the cow had been milked.Mr. Bill : , December 16, 2016 at 10:28 PMTrump was a coo, he was not supported by the voters. But by the global elite.
Hillary Clinton lost because she is truly an ugly aristocrat.Mr. Bill -> Mr. Bill... , December 16, 2016 at 11:49 PMThe experience of voting for the Hill was painful, vs Donald Trump.Mr. Bill -> Mr. Bill... , December 17, 2016 at 12:11 AMThe Hill seemed like the least likely aristocrat, given two choices, to finish off all government focus on the folks that actually built this society. Two Titans of Hubris, Hillary vs Donald, each ridiculous in the concept of representing the interests of the common man.
At the end of the day. the American people decided that the struggle with the unknown monster Donald was worth deposing the great deplorable, Clinton.
The real argument is whether the correct plan of action is the way of FDR, or the way of the industrialists, the Waltons, the Kochs, the Trumps, the Bushes and the outright cowards like the Cheneys and the Clintons, people that never spent a day defending this country in combat. What do they call it, the Commander in Chief.Mr. Bill -> Mr. Bill... , December 17, 2016 at 12:29 AMMy father was awarded a silver and a bronze star for his efforts in battle during WW2. He was shot in the face while driving a tank destroyer by a German sniper in a place called Schmitten Germany.Mr. Bill -> Mr. Bill... , December 17, 2016 at 12:55 AMHe told me once, that he looked over at the guy next to him on the plane to the hospital in England, and his intestines were splayed on his chest. It was awful.
What was he fighting for ? Freedom, America. Then the Republicans, Ronald Reagan, who spent the war stateside began the real war, garnering the wealth of the nation to the entitled like him. Ronald Reagan was a life guard.btg : , December 16, 2016 at 11:09 PMOther idiots...greg : , December 16, 2016 at 11:57 PMAnthony Weiner
Podesta
Biden (for not running)
Tim Kaine (for accepting the nomination instead of deferring to a latino)
CNN and other TV news media (for giving trump so much coverage- even an empty podium)
Donna Brazile
etc.The people of the United States did not have much to choose between: Either a servant of the Plutocrats or a member of the Plutocratic class. The Dems brought this on us when they refused to play fair with Bernie. (Hillary would almost certainly have won the nomination anyway.)Eric377 : , -1The Repubs brought this on, by refusing to govern. The media brought this on: I seem to remember Hillary's misfeasances, once nominated, festering in the media, while Trump's were mentioned, and then disappeared. (Correct me if I'm wrong in this.) Also, the media downplayed Bernie until he had no real chance.
The government brought this on, by failing to pursue justice against the bankers, and failing to represent the people, especially the majority who have been screwed by trade and the plutocratic elite and their apologists.
The educational system brought this on, by failing to educate the people to critical thought. For instance: 1) The wealthy run the country. 2) The wealthy have been doing very well. 3) Everybody else has not. It seems most people cannot draw the obvious conclusion.
The wealthy brought this on. For 230 years they have, essentially run this country. They are too stupid to be satisfied with enough, but always want more.
The economics profession brought this on, by excusing treasonous behavior as efficient, and failing to understand the underlying principles of their profession, and the limits of their understanding. (They don't even know what money is, or how a trade deficit destroys productive capacity, and thus the very ability of a nation to pay back the debts it incurs.)
The people brought this on, by neglecting their duty to be informed, to be educated, and to be thoughtful.
Anybody else care for their share of blame? I myself deserve some, but for reasons I cannot say.
What amazes me now is, the bird having shown its feathers, there is no howl of outrage from the people who voted for him. Do they imagine that the Plutocrats who will soon monopolize the White House will take their interests to heart?
As far as I can tell, not one person of 'the people' has been appointed to his cabinet. Not one. But the oppressed masses who turned to Mr Trump seem to be OK with this.
I can only wonder, how much crap will have to be rubbed in their faces, before they awaken to the taste of what it is?Krugman is himself one of those most useful idiots. I do not recall his clarion call to Democrats last spring that "FBI investigation" and "party Presidential nominee" was bound to be an ugly combination. Some did; right here as I recall. Or his part in the official "don't vote for third party" week in the Clinton media machine....thanks, hundreds of thousands of Trump votes got the message.Greg -> Eric377... , December 17, 2016 at 12:11 PMIt's too rich to complain about Russia and Wikileaks as if those elements in anyway justified Clinton becoming President. Leaks mess with our democracy? Then for darn sure do not vote for a former Sec. of State willing to use a home server for her official business. Russia is menacing? Just who has been managing US-Russia relations the past 8 years? I voted for her anyway, but the heck if I think some tragic fate has befell the nation here. Republicans picked a better candidate to win this thing than we Democrats did.
Well said, Eric377.The truth of the matter is that Clinton was a very weak candidate with nothing to offer but narcissism ("I'm with her"). It's notable that Clinton has still not accepted responsibility for her campaign, preferring to throw the blame for the loss anywhere but herself. Sociopathy much?
This has made me cynical. I used to think that at least *some* members of the US political elite had the best interests of ordinary households in mind, but now I see that it's just ego vs. ego, whatever the party.
As for democracy being on the edge: I believe Adam Smith over Krugman: "there is a lot of ruin in a nation". It takes more than this to overturn an entrenched institution.
I think American democracy will survive a decade of authoritarianism, and if it does not, then H. L. Mencken said it best: "The American people know what they want, and they deserve to get it -- good and hard."
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Dec 13, 2016 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
December 12, 2016 by Yves Smith By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Jointly published with New Economic PerspectivesOn December 10, 2016, a New York Times article entitled "Democrats Have a New Message: It's the Economy First" that unintentionally revealed that the Party's "centrist" leadership and the paper remain clueless about how to improve the economy and why the "centrist" leadership needs to end its long war against the working class. This is how the paper explained the five "centrist" leaders' framing of the problem.
It was a blunt, plain-spoken set of senators who gathered last Monday at the Washington home of Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat of North Dakota, dining on Chinese food as they vented frustration about the missteps of the Democratic Party .
To this decidedly centrist group, the 2016 election was nothing short of a fiasco: final proof that its national party had grown indifferent to the rural, more conservative areas represented by Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Jon Tester of Montana, who attended the dinner. All face difficult re-election races in 2018.
This non-centrist group was a gathering of five New Democrats. President Obama self-identified himself as a New Democrat. The Clintons and Al Gore are leaders of the New Democrats. The leadership of the Democratic National Committee was, and remains, New Democrats. On economic issues such as austerity, jobs, and full employment, the New Democrats are far more extreme than the (stated) views of Donald Trump. The New Democrats are infamous for their close ties with Wall Street. This means that the paper's description of the Chinese nosh is as clueless as the five New Democrats kvetching about policy "missteps" that they championed for decades. Of course, neither the paper nor the non-centrists mentioned that critical fact. The blindness of the non-centrists to the fact that it is their policies that launched the long war by the New Democrats against the working class is matched by the blindness of the paper.
The kvetching may have been "blunt," but it was also dishonest. The five New Democrats know that they will likely be replaced in the 2018 elections by Republicans who share the New Democrats' anti-working class dogmas. What was really going on was an extended cry of pain about the five senators' fear of losing their jobs.
Note that the paper never tells you what the five New Democrats so bluntly identified as the New Democrats' "missteps" or what new policies they believed needed to be adopted by the Party. This failure is particularly bizarre because the paper says that its reportage is based on sources that the paper agreed to keep anonymous so that they could speak frankly about this meeting over Chinese food. That combination of supposed frankness from the sources gained by the grant of anonymity so them could describe in detail the purported bluntness by the gang of five should have produced some epic, specific condemnations of the Democratic Party's leadership by the New Democrats. Instead, it produced mush. Focusing on the "economy" is the right general idea for any political party, but it is so general a word that it is close to meaningless without identifying the specific policy changes that the five New Democrats now support and oppose. The mushy reportage provides a thin gruel to the reader.
Most of all, they lamented, Democrats had simply failed to offer a clarion message about the economy with appeal to all 50 states.
"Why did the working people, who have always been our base, turn away?" Mr. Manchin said in an interview, recounting the tenor of the dinner conversation.
And the "clarion message about the economy" that they proposed that the Democratic Party make was? You would have thought that little detail would (a) be critical to the article and (b) would be something that the five New Democrats would have been eager to publicize without any need for anonymity. Conversely, if even after the disastrous election, from their perspective, the five New Democrats could not compose that "clarion" call, then the real problem is that the New Democrats' economic dogmas prevent them from supporting such a "clarion" pro-worker policy.
The second sentence of the quotation is equally embarrassing to the New Democrats. It purportedly recounts "the tenor of the dinner conversation." The first obvious question is – how did each of these five New Democrats answer that that question? That is what the readers would want to know. Even with the grants of anonymity to multiple sources the paper inexplicably presents only the vaguest hints as to the five Senators' explanation for why the New Democrats waged their long war on the working class.
Notice also the unintentional humor of the five New Democrats finally asking themselves this existential question in 2016 – after the election. The New Democrats began their long war on the working class over 30 years ago. Tom Frank published his famous (initial) book warning that the New Democrats' war on the working class would prove disastrous in 2004. The five New Democrats are shocked, shocked that the working class, after 30 years of being abused by the New Democrats' anti-worker policies and after being vilified for decades by the New Democrats, overwhelmingly voted against the Nation's most prominent New Democrat, Hillary Clinton. None of the five New Democrats appears to have a clue, even after the 2016 election, why this happened.
The article and the five New Democrats fail to discuss the anti-working class policies that they have championed for decades. Job security is the paramount issue that drives voting by many members of the working class. The New Democrats and the Old Republicans share a devotion to the two greatest threats to working class job security – austerity and the faux free trade deals. This makes it ironic that the paper sought out the Party faction leaders who have been so wrong for so long as supposedly being the unique source of providing the right answers now. If the five New Democrats had engaged in introspection and were prepared to discuss their disastrous, repeated policy failures that would have been valuable, but the New Democrats admit to making zero errors in the article.
The paper's understanding of economics and jobs is so poor that it wrote this clunker.
But even liberals believe Democrats must work harder to compete for voters who lean to the right, if only to shave a few points off the Republican Party's margin of victory in rural America. In some cases, they said, that may mean embracing candidates who hold wildly different views from the national party on certain core priorities.
First, the phrase and the implicit logic in the use of the phrase "even liberals" reverses reality. It is progressives who have consistently called for the Democratic Party to return to its role as a party that champions working people.
Second, the issue is generally not who "leans to the right." Indeed, the 2016 election should have made clear to the paper the severe limits on the usefulness of the terms "right" and "left" in explaining U.S. elections. Jobs are not a right v. left issue.
Third, the paramount policy priority – jobs – is the same regardless of whether one focuses on economic or political desirability. So, how long does it take for the article, and the five New Democrats to discuss "jobs?" Given the fact that they vented at length about the fear that they would begin to lose their jobs within two years, the subject of job security should have been paramount to the five New Democrats. The article, however, never even mentioned jobs or any of the related critical concepts – austerity, the faux trade deals, or the refusal to provide full employment. Further, the article did not comment on the failure of the New Democrats to even mention these any of these four concepts.
"A Clarion Message about the Economy with Appeal to all 50 States"
Here is UMKC's economics department's long-standing proposal to every American political party:
Our party stands for full employment at all times. We will make the federal government the guaranteed employer of last resort for every American able and wanting to work. We recognize that the United States has a sovereign currency and can always afford to ensure full employment. We recognize that austerity typically constitutes economic malpractice and is never a valid excuse for rejecting full employment. The myth that we help our grandchildren by consigning their grandparents and parents to unemployment is obscene. The opposite is true.
The working class wants jobs and job security – not simply income. Working class people overwhelmingly want to work. Working class males who are unable to find secure, full time work often become depressed and unmarriageable. If you want to encourage marriage and improve the quality of marriages, full employment and job security are vital policies. There are collateral advantages to providing full employment. Full employment can reduce greatly the "zero sum" fears about employment that can tear a society apart. Each of these outcomes is overwhelmingly supported by Americans.
Good economics is not a "right" v. "left" issue. Austerity is terrible economics. The fact that we have a sovereign currency is indisputable and there is broad agreement among finance professionals that such a currency means that the federal government budget is nothing like a household. The major party that first adopts the federal full employment guarantee will secure a critical political advantage over its rivals. Sometimes, good economics is good politics.
Disturbed Voter , December 12, 2016 at 6:13 amvlade , December 12, 2016 at 7:02 amIt is critical that existing Democrat leadership goes into retirement. Finagling the Clintons back into the WH, delays this by 4, 8 or more years. Besides generating immense animosity. This could be easily accomplished if all Democrat leadership retires at 65 immediately, to live on their Social Security and Medicare (if they think those are still important).
steelhead23 , December 12, 2016 at 11:35 amah, but there was a "clarion message". It was "we care not even about the 1%, but the 0.01%. The rest of you can piss off".
Which is why Dems got dumped.sgt_doom , December 12, 2016 at 6:11 pmI suspect this meeting was functionally similar to the ecclesiastic kvetching when folks began to believe the world was a sphere some 600 years ago. I can imagine them thinking: unemployment (as they measure it) is low, housing prices are jumping, and boy, look at that stock market – how did our base constituency lose its way?
As long as the Democratic Party leadership thinks this way, the party is useless and should be abandoned. I might suggest that Bill, Yves, Randy Wray, and others get to work educating them, but like flat-earthers, these folks not only live in willful ignorance, they would very much like to cast that crowd on the pyre of false-news purveyors lest they lead even more of the faithful astray.
timotheus , December 12, 2016 at 7:43 amI have to fully agree with Prof. Black's assessment; thought this when they reelected Nancy "my son works at Countrywide" Pelosi and doubled down on their identity politics. (David Harvey disposes of identity politics in a single sentence in his latest book.)
lyman alpha blob , December 12, 2016 at 1:06 pmBut in this Lewis Carroll universe, "Work harder to compete for Republican votes" doesn't mean steal Trump's jobs-related thunder but give in on things like fracking a la Madame Heitkamp, or discover an enthusiasm for guns like Manchin, or run anti-abortion stalwarts like Donnelly. That's why the reporter couldn't depart from the vague mush–the "centrists'" solution to the Democrats' debacle is to become Republicans.
NotTimothyGeithner , December 12, 2016 at 2:06 pmMy folks are bible thumping, Fox News watching, prolife, and anti-gay marriage voters.
They were all set to vote for Bernie, not because they agreed with him on everything, but because he was fighting for people like them and he was honest. They would have burned in H-E-double-hockey-sticks before voting for Clinton though. Judging by the polls during the primaries and the eventual outcome, they were far from alone in their assessment. Too bad the dimwit DC Dems can't be bothered to actually talk to people like them.
The Trumpening , December 12, 2016 at 8:05 amThey sort of do talk to people like your relatives, but partisanship is strong. Plenty of local Democrats can diagnose and propose solutions caused by the GOP but will worship Trump if he had a "D" next to his name. Claire McCaskill probably receives enough praise from partisan plebes for no payment she assumes all the plebes should love her. For conservative types, Sanders not being in the other tribe was a huge selling point.
fresno dan , December 12, 2016 at 10:44 amThe fundamental power diagram of politics is that groups of donors select groups of politicians to fight for the interests of the donors. The complication in democracy is that the voters select which politicians will rule. So the donors are like a client, the politicians like a lawyer and the voters are like a jury. A talented politician is one who can cunningly convince voters to set her guilty donors free.
So all these New Democrats are doing is suggesting ways to better plead to the jury. But they are in no way questioning the donors or whether they should continue to push policies that only serve the donors' best interests
One revolutionary feature of Donald Trump's campaign was that he was his own donor and so was very free to directly appeal to what is in the best interests of the working class voters he targeted: economic nationalism.
Conversely the most problematic feature of the Trump campaign was that he was running as the head of a party that did have plenty of donors and he was openly contradicting plenty of these donors' interests. But Trump correctly calculated that the only way to power in America was to hijack one of the two legacy parties.
In some ways Bernie Sanders attempted a similar feat, although I remain skeptical about whether he really was trying to win. If Sanders had become President, he would be facing the same problems that Trump now faces; how to rule a party whose policies fundamentally diverge in many areas from what you have promised to deliver.
And so until the Democrat change donors – specifically by announcing that as a party they will only accept small donations and adopt some of the Trump tactics to reduce campaign spending – nothing will change except the sound bites. Many working class people realized exactly how flawed Trump was but they rolled the dice for one reason only – no one owned Trump. Or as Henry Kissinger put it:
"This president-elect, it's the most unique that I have experienced in one respect. He has absolutely no baggage," Kissinger told CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS." "He has no obligation to any particular group because he has become president on the basis of his own strategy."
Kissinger is smart so he makes these words sound blasé but I can assure you they strike fear into the hearts of America's elite. But only when we hear these same elites expressing fear of the entire Democratic party (like they did about Bernie Sanders) will we know something fundamental has changed for the better.
NotTimothyGeithner , December 12, 2016 at 12:03 pmThe Trumpening
December 12, 2016 at 8:05 amSome very good insights. I would be curious to know your thoughts on when the repub/Trump split comes, which way will FOX tilt? Right now FOX is all Trump, but after a year or two of insinuations that Trump is a Pro Putin commie, I suspect the masterful propagandists that make so much of our beliefs will either cause the actual downfall of Trump, or will more than neuter him.
jrs , December 12, 2016 at 12:09 pmTrump was selected by Republican voters despite Fox not being his BFF. Trump is the GOP, and Republican voters support their own. 41 called Reagan a practitoner of Voodoo economics. Yes, this was an appeal to the Southern strategy. Attacks on Trump that say he's not a "true conservative" will never work. Trump is a known clown. He can't embarrass himself, and I think it's important to remember Iraq happened. What did the average Republican voter take from that? Putin Fear Fest is very similar to the events of 2002.
Periodically, new tribal arrangements need to be made. Romney was given a chance. He failed, so the GOP voters selected someone new. Republicans hate Democrats. Attacks levied by Democrats will always be brushed off.
Videos could emerge of Trump swearing allegiance to Putin at an orgy, and Republican voters wouldn't care.
This Russia stuff isn't about Trump but about the Democrats pleading with people not to look at the man behind the curtain.
NotTimothyGeithner , December 12, 2016 at 12:56 pmYes Republicans stick together plus they think Trump is most likely to accomplish their "small government" goals and so they support Trump (this is probably true, the establishment supported Hillary, but many a Republican votes party line for one of their own).
fresno dan , December 12, 2016 at 3:43 pmHillary did well with defense contract related Republicans, but they are clustered. The ones in hideously over priced McMansions in Virginia and Maryland are terrified of spending being redirected. They have mortgages to pay, and if Trump thinkers with defense spending whether through cutting cutting or moving, Northern Virginia will become a land of white elephants. Northern Virginia might have incomes, but outside of old town Alexandria, it's a dump of out of control suburban sprawl.
No one sane would live there by choice. The costs are too high to relocate a corporate operation or even grow one. Republicans in Wisconsin don't care.
schmoe , December 12, 2016 at 6:41 pmNotTimothyGeithner
December 12, 2016 at 12:03 pmOh, I agree with your overall points. I was just wondering specifically about Murdoch and if his contrariness will make FOX pro Russian ((in the face of overwhelming repub foreign policy establishment against Trump)), or will FOX be the "repub" anti Russain brand. It will be interesting when being "conservative" means you like Putin .
And I remember how many rabidly anti communists where having conniptions when Reagan met with Gorbachev in Iceland. But Reagan was well ensconced in the establishment. Can Trump alone end the red menace?
The Trumpening , December 12, 2016 at 12:22 pm? – "Trump was selected by Republican voters despite Fox not being his BFF. " Hannity and O'Reilly segments this past cycle were one hour propaganda news feeds for Trump.
NotTimothyGeithner , December 12, 2016 at 1:15 pmAs far as Fox goes from what I understand they are currently split - with Kelly Megyn (I know), Brit Hume, and Chris Wallace being anti-Trump while Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs are pro-Trump bigly. This is a smart balancing of Fox's short term need for viewers versus their longer-term policy requirements. But there can be no doubt that Rupert Murdoch is rabidly anti-Trump - he even gave that raving NeverTrump lunatic Louise Mensch a website called HeatStreet.
From glancing at the National Review it seems the GOPe think they are being generous by admitting defeat and magnanimously getting behind Trump's cultural agenda while insisting conservatives stay in charge of economic and foreign policy. But this is no change at all since the Republicans have always been offering the working classes empty cultural issues.
I imagine the Republicans see this as a Tour de France with them being the huge peloton while Trump is a lone breakaway attacker who they will soon swallow back up and totally co-opt.
I don't think the MSM are that good at propaganda; if they were Trump wouldn't be President!. For example now they have launched this Trump + Putin campaign but Trump responds by picking a fight with China. But the MSM is aghast and totally support the Chinese position! So they accuse Trump of carrying water for Russia put there's the entire MSM all lined up with buckets of Chinese water on their heads!
I suppose at some point several top GOP Senators (McCain, Flake) and a bottom (Lindsey Graham) will leave the party and caucus with the Democrats to ensure legislative gridlock. I believe if Trump really tried he could get a House of Representatives that supports him. I don't see how he herds the Senate though.
samkoki , December 12, 2016 at 11:48 pmPropaganda only works when people are aware there is no curtain. At this point, the Wizard of Oz has been revealed, and unlike Baum's creation, he has no redeeming qualities. Telling everyone to look at the big giant head again fails.
The msm and the Democrats don't know how to function moving forward because building trust will take years of effort, and many of the specific personalities are done. They can never be attached to a competitive effort without undermining the effort. If they hope to retake their spot, when FB seemed trendy and not a mom hangout, they need people to forget about the curtain, but it's impossible. Instead they will whine about wicked witches of the North.
Even Trump won because the GOP misfits were sheepdogs for Jeb. Whatever else Trump was, he wasn't part of Jeb's curtain. Shouting Trump is a fraud doesn't work as long as you then scream "pay no mind to the strings on my back." I think Rufio could have made more noise if he wasn't such an obvious beta as he attacked Jeb, but one could argue he betrayed Jeb. People don't like that kind of thing.
Adamski , December 13, 2016 at 5:59 amHogwash.
Bernie proved that there is plenty of money for candidates with the right intent and policies.
What you say, that dems can't win without its moneyed donor class, is a notion that has been used to bludgeon democrats into conservatism and passivity.
Bernie blasted your assertion about campaign finance to bits.
As to the dems "figuring something out," the dem leadership doesn't need to figure anything out. They are perfectly happy serving the 1%. It's the rest of the democrats who need to figure that out about their leadership and take action, whether it is tossing the leadership or starting a new party.
aab , December 13, 2016 at 6:07 amAccording to an NYT article about his campaign, Sanders was not running to win until after his popularity started to skyrocket. Initially he was still attending the Senate and was not campaigning fulltime.
It was just an attempt to spread his liberal policy message nationwide. But how to control the party as President when it's opposed to him on policy? That's what "political revolution" meant. If Congress opposed Trump, he will have a rally of thousands in the district of any difficult legislator blaming him or her for not letting Trump make America great again.
Similarly Sanders can campaign to either get a Dem majority, it he hadn't got one in 2016, by 2018. Or to increase it or make it more liberal. This is what he did when the city council opposed him in Burlington, Vermont. Within a year he got one which was much more pliable. The progressives never got a majority but he went from Obama-style gridlock to a working government.
Marshall Auerback , December 12, 2016 at 8:05 amOne correction: Bernie Sanders is not a liberal. He is a democratic socialist. It's not a minor point, particularly because liberals deliberately obfuscate the difference to con voters.
Liberals believe in hierarchy. I'm pretty confident Bernie Sanders is an egalitarian. That matters, when it comes to policy and governance, as well as core values.
Clive , December 12, 2016 at 2:02 pmPutin is not the one responsible for manipulating Democrats into an intensely pro-Wall Street, anti-working class political posture that loses elections.
Normal , December 12, 2016 at 8:11 amI agree - if the "old" parties act like the old neoliberal parties, they can't solve our current predicament. While our predicament isn't a new one, just a new version of an old problem, retreading the past 20 or 30 years isn't going to do the trick.
Arizona Slim , December 12, 2016 at 8:26 amGov't as employer as last resort is a huge leap from the goals of full employment and job security. This is promoted here and elsewhere without any rationale. Someone will have to explain why this is the only possible solution.
jrs , December 12, 2016 at 12:12 pmHave you noticed the private sector stepping up? With a free market jobs program that would provide full employment? I haven't either.
fritter , December 12, 2016 at 8:40 amPlus the quality of the jobs in the private sector is often horrible (of course not all but many). There is a reason everyone wants a government job. And unless the government sector forces the private sector to improve the quality of their jobs (ie living wages and ACTUALLY enforce overtime and safety and etc. not to mention all the contract work going on that isn't EVEN jobs) it will remain so. Quality of jobs matters.
Cry Shop , December 12, 2016 at 9:18 amNot really, but try explaining the opposite. How can we have full employment without gov't employment as last resort? Granted you can have "goals" all you want if you ignore them, but we'll put that aside and assume you are not disingenuous.
Everything else has been tried and failed, miserably. Companies sit on piles of cash without significant hiring. Tax incentives get gamed easily.
Offering employment is the simplest, most targeted solution that effectively cuts the rest of the employers out of the hostage taking business.Mark Anderlik , December 12, 2016 at 10:37 amThe working class wants jobs and job security – not simply income.
I rather like the term used here instead of jobs , people want a livelihood. In the USA, that get's shortened into jobs, and then later short changed again into things like minimum wage. One could have fully employment and terrible livelihood. Only the Japanese could put up with 50+ years of being economic animals. Anyone who thinks full employment is going to solve issues like income inequality has been eating mushrooms picked from the cow pasture.
Cry Shop , December 12, 2016 at 11:25 amYes. Better to say "good jobs." Nearly 40% of workers in my community work at low-wage jobs that do not provide for a decent living on its own.
Waldenpond , December 12, 2016 at 12:07 pmI just don't even like the idea of "good jobs" - so limited and so American.
For example, Jobs won't save us from Climate Change, it's not just a money issue. Hence Livelihood, as in lets make sure the bastards who made this mess die before we do, then we;ll have some justice to make our miserable end more bearable. http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/links-121216.html#comment-2725938
lyman alpha blob , December 12, 2016 at 1:15 pmFull employment is the growth argument. Both would be beneficial but I would prefer the switch to income/leisure. Shorter work week, more leisure activities, less consumption, less growth.
Waldenpond , December 12, 2016 at 2:13 pmDitto. Government doesn't need to provide jobs where people go to the office and get paid to sit on their rear end all day – we already have enough of those in the public and private sectors.
I'd like to see a basic income guarantee with some sort of mandatory work required to get it. Something like the draft where people are called up to work for a certain period of time on a rotating basis but also giving them some say in what sort of job they get to do. One year you work at job x for a period of time, train your replacement and then get a bunch of time off. The next year you can try something different at job y.
lyman alpha blob , December 12, 2016 at 2:27 pmMandatory work everything is work. Yes, you can have call up for people who want to do a stint/internship learning large scale community construction, infrastructure, plumbing, electrical, etc.
Still, there needs to be jobs where people sit on their back sides part of a day some prefer working in offices and some are only able to work in offices.
But stretch the imagination: Community service runs the gamut: people to clean up streets, keep gutters open, scrape up weeds, maintain plantings, paint, repair; assisting children, seniors and animals; art etc. I am not a musician nor actor but would appreciate having free/low cost local enrichment programs. Public schools (the ones left) could be used in the evening for free classes: electronics, woodworking, engine/household repair, cooking, nutrition, etc.
And yes, there will be a need for people who sit on their rear ends to help organize and track activities. :)
polecat , December 12, 2016 at 7:11 pmYes what you said.
And don't get me wrong about the rear end sitting – I don't mean those types of jobs shouldn't exist, I just mean that when you show up at the office you ought to have some actual work to do. And going to meetings deciding what work others should be doing doesn't count. I've worked at a few where I was required to be there for eight hours a day but only had four hours of work to do, and not for lack of asking.
One can only read the whole internet so many times a day ;)
jrs , December 12, 2016 at 12:18 pm'Shorter work week, more leisure activities, less consumption, less growth.'
and lots of Free birthcontrol ..
Waldenpond , December 12, 2016 at 12:33 pmWhat nonsense it is to generalize what the working class as a whole wants (and really this probably should include everyone who works for a living). Some want jobs, some income. If everyone only wanted jobs no mothers would ever stay home to raise children etc..
HotFlash , December 12, 2016 at 9:09 amEverything is work, everything is a job. If you take care of an elderly relative, it's duty (unpaid labor), if you take care of an elderly stranger it's a job. If you raise your own children, it's duty (unpaid labor), if raise others children, it's a job.
Elites are claiming more and more work is duty and of course it should be unpaid not to mention volunteerism.
If there was an income guarantee, most would labor their days away as work contributes to social connection and provides personal satisfaction.
If there was an income, I imagine social life would be richer as more people could be artists (festivals!), performers (community theater!), work in schools (art, music, construction classes) etc.
Eclair , December 12, 2016 at 10:27 amAnd, of course, it is the government that is the issuer of this sovereign currency that they cannot run out of. Or are you suggesting that the government give the $$ to the private sector, which will, of course, trickle it on down? We could call it, I don't know, how about 'quantitative easing'?
Another reason to prefer the government (which, after all, is "us") to administer jobs-for-all is providing jobs that do useful things for society which could not be provided on a for-profit basis. Um, like daycare, medical care, public utilities, eldercare, voter registration, education, making things that are repairable, and then repairing them when they need it, organic agriculture, humane animal husbandry, saving the monarch butterflies, *manual* residential snow shoveling - all those things that 'cost too much' for a for-profit business to do.
Cry Shop , December 12, 2016 at 12:03 pmExactly, HotFlash. And, notice that so many of these livelihoods, child and eldercare, teaching, repair persons, garbage collectors, snow plow operators, have been relegated to the level of 'minimum wage jobs,' and the people that perform these necessary services consigned to the ranks of 'too dumb to be innovators or investment bankers.'
We have been conned into mumbling to our military, 'thank you for your service,' as they get to board flights before us. Why not honor trash collectors and the women who clean the toilets in our workplaces and the workers who are out on the county roads and interstates at 2am in a blizzard, keeping the roads clear so we don't have to be inconveniences? Where would our society be without them?
manymusings , December 12, 2016 at 11:39 amDouglas Adams was only being partially facetious when he had the an advanced civilization wiped out because they shipped out their phone cleaners on rocket-ships (ala the Marching Morons). It was his subtle rebuke to both Kornbluth and the Ayn Randian/neo-conservative of that time, as well as the general vapid consumerist society.
As to the military, I always favored the Coast Guard, they risk their lives to save other humans, not help the MIC and Empire.
juliania , December 12, 2016 at 1:35 pmI think explaining govt-as-employer-of last-resort becomes easy once a few misconceptions are corrected and a few realities sink in. But it's no small thing for the realities to sink in - everything we've been taught, or encouraged to assume, is working against us. Conventional, responsible wisdom is that the wealth one has that didn't come from the government is "earned" and any activity that "earns" money is inherently productive and being productive is good - it makes one worthy. People think of "money" as the stuff passed around in big green wads in the movies, that comes into being through work an ingenuity (unless the govt commits the sin of "just printing it"). Distribution may not be "fair" but it at least follows certain intuitive laws or forces, that have a vague sense of morality associated with them (e.g., money is earned through productivity which means whoever has it by definition earned it, e.g. MH point on FIRE sector). It is a tautology - but a powerful one. People don't think of money as the product of accounting, a two sided coin created literally from a balance sheet - debits and credits, assets and liabilities - and that commercial banks can conjure "money" - pump it into circulation - simply by marking an asset in their ledger. People don't know that banks issue loans (create assets) out of nothing all the time (i.e., loans without corresponding deposits or reserves, loaning what they don't "have"). The asset becomes revenue-generating through interests and fees, which, if non-liquidating, are the precise opposite of "productive."
It is so difficult for this to sink in because our society organizes itself as if this weren't true. Speaking personally, it takes a persistent, systematic re-organization of how we process facts and arguments. We hear something like a "sovereign currency can never run out" as a justification for universal income or govt-as-employer-of-last-resort, and it triggers a deeply embedded sense that somehow this would send the economy spinning of the rails. But once it sinks in that "money" is just an asset/liability, and its entry into private circulation is purely a matter of public policy (not private "productivity"), at least then you're asking the right question: how should a sovereign inject currency into private circulation? Maybe no one answer is universally right at all times and in all circumstances .. but at this point debt is outpacing actual productivity, which means it must be written down (MH argument) and/or there needs to be an injection on the debtor side to try to catch up (e.g., jobs program or universal income). Which is why it is so nonsensical for the govt to "print money" in the form of transferring assets in the form of increasing bank reserves, as if bank lending depends on reserves at all it's like trying to fill a pool but flooding your sink). At least that's how I make sense of it still may botch the details, but at least once you strip away the cultural/social/moral baggage, it becomes more of a matter of simple economic logic that doesn't need a larger explanation. If you want to fill the pool, fill the pool, not the sink. But the baggage is real - which is why it really does seem to be a matter of letting the realities sink in.
KYrocky , December 12, 2016 at 8:20 amThe baggage you speak of actually began with Reagan when from a government position of high privilege he actually sneered at government as the employer of last resort with his statement belittling "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." Which a subservient press took and ran with to make sure it settled into everyone's subconscious. It's helpful to revisit the rise of Ronald Reagan, and to remember that Obama took him as his role model, not FDR.
This battle has been ongoing in American politics probably since way back before the Great Depression, but that's as far back as some of us remember our parents telling us about. I love Bill Black because he's the kind of Democrat I thought I was. This new crowd makes me sick. It's appropriate that Obama's murder weapons are called drones. That's what the New Democrats are: drones.
Dave McCrae , December 12, 2016 at 8:20 amThe New Democrats will likely go the way of the blue dog Democrats. Their Republican voters will ask themselves why should they vote for a powerless Republican-lite, and they will simply die politically.
They care about staying a Senator. They care about themselves first and only, and will suck up to and serve whoever provides the money that allows them to hold onto their seats.
Voters in these red states voted for change, above all else. They voted for a nut job because they finally heard a candidate speaking to their issues and concerns, something their Senators, apparently, have not done.
manymusings , December 12, 2016 at 8:23 amThere will soon be so few democrats remaining that we should give some serious consideration to a sequestration solution of giving them their own land, with no fossil fuel degradation, clean water from the glaciers, a tiny house, a pouch of seeds, and a sustainable truck garden, no cars trucks or bicycles, a fig tree in the middle of town. They could either pay taxes or not, as they felt motivated, and provide their own services regardless as not to be a burden. We could gather them up and have a long march to their new home; it would be hravenly! The rest of us could peacefully proceed to hell.
cnchal , December 12, 2016 at 11:10 amThis is mind blowing. Granted I didn't follow the link to the full story - but how on earth is this even news , even under the pathetic standards of election post mortems? New dems concoct self-admiring story, posture as the ones who "get it." Feed it to reporter, who agrees to attribute anonymously of course (so it has the feel of insiders and not high schoolers). I'm guessing what these courageous centrists really mean with the confused prescription to court voters who "lean right" is to appeal on social/cultural issues. Scold "elitist identity politics" of the national party as a distraction from the "economic message" (which of course will be the same assault on decency it always has been). So "economy first" would mean attack/exploit social liberalism and call it a "fight" for the economic plight of the every-man/woman. The beauty is you get to sound angry on behalf of voters without an iota of accountability or reflection, without ever having to answer for shallow, self-serving policies and abject failure.
flora , December 12, 2016 at 12:48 pmSome times Bill is so over the top it is comical.
Note that the paper never tells you what the five New Democrats so bluntly identified as the New Democrats' "missteps" or what new policies they believed needed to be adopted by the Party. This failure is particularly bizarre because the paper says that its reportage is based on sources that the paper agreed to keep anonymous so that they could speak frankly about this meeting over Chinese food. . .
The five New Democrats were: Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Jon Tester of Montana, at a dinner held at the Washington home of Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat of North Dakota.
So, not anonymous at all.
Here is the key part to understanding the plight of the politician / narcissist that feels the wrath of voters.
. . . All face difficult re-election races in 2018.
There is nothing worse than being ignored, but fail to understand that what they themselves fear, being ignored with no jawb, the peasants have been living with for decades. Hypocrite is the word and these are vacuous human beings that care only about themselves no matter what emotional fakery they use.
cnchal , December 12, 2016 at 4:01 pmUm .
what the five New Democrats so bluntly identified as the New Democrats' "missteps" or what new policies they believed needed to be adopted by the PartyUm, noun (subject)-verb-object. what (noun) was identified as (verb) "missteps" and "'policies" (objects) eg. the 5 did not identify the missteps or policies.
juliania , December 12, 2016 at 1:56 pmComical. The first line in Bill's post gets the NYT headline wrong.
On December 10, 2016, a New York Times article entitled "Democrats Have a New Message: It's the Economy First"
The actual headline is "Democrats Hone a New Message: It's the Economy Everyone ". A small detail for sure, which implies from The NYT it's a purveyor of fake news, because honing implies a refinement of a message already being said, and is contradicted within two words, by the word "new". It is possible that the headlines keep changing and that Bill's was up when he quoted them, which would solidify their reputation of fake news purveyors.
Getting back to the meat of Bill's post.
This failure is particularly bizarre because the paper says that its reportage is based on sources that the paper agreed to keep anonymous so that they could speak frankly about this meeting over Chinese food. That combination of supposed frankness from the sources gained by the grant of anonymity so them could describe in detail the purported bluntness by the gang of five should have produced some epic, specific condemnations of the Democratic Party's leadership by the New Democrats. Instead, it produced mush . . .
Going to the NYT article here is the reference to anonymous sources, so I freely admit to being wrong about Bill's anonymous Chinese food eating party (or wake) attendees being the fatuous five.
The party, these senators said, had grown overly fixated on cultural issues with limited appeal to the heartland. They criticized Hillary Clinton's campaign slogan, "Stronger Together," as flat and opaque, according to multiple people present at the dinner, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity .
This is the NYT's only reference to anonymity and furthers it's reputation of a fake news purveyor as the word "some" implies that some would go on record but either couldn't be found or weren't asked.
The rest of the article segues into a pity party, from those that weren't there.
Moderate Democrats are not alone in their sense of urgency about honing a new economic message. After a stinging loss to Donald J. Trump, liberals in the party are also trying to figure out how to tap into the populist unrest that convulsed both parties in 2016. Only by making pocketbook issues the central focus, they say, can Democrats recover in the 2018 midterm elections and unseat Mr. Trump in 2020.
"We need to double down and double down again on the importance of building an economy not just for those at the top, but for everyone ," said Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a high-profile progressive who is seen as a leading potential opponent for Mr. Trump.
Elizabeth Warren doesn't realize that those at the top stole it from everyone else, and quadrupling down on building an economy that works for those at the top won't work for those at the bottom or anyone else except for those at the top.
Beyond that, they expect wide variance in how officeholders handle Mr. Trump and his agenda, from moderates who seek out accommodation to blue-state leaders who pursue total war . Their emerging message is likely to focus on protecting Medicare and Social Security, attacking income inequality and political corruption , and blocking legislation that might restrict access to health care.
"Likely" and "might" are weasel words. How likely are those that live and breath corruption to cut off their own supply?
The whole article is a mix of real and fake news and some days I like my comedy, black.
Ignacio , December 12, 2016 at 2:27 pmWell, I laughed myself silly over this one:
"So, how long does it take for the article, and the five New Democrats to discuss "jobs?" Given the fact that they vented at length about the fear that they would begin to lose their jobs within two years, the subject of job security should have been paramount to the five New Democrats."
I'm still chuckling. It's sort of like five roosters in a chicken coop that only has room for one, all vying to become Chanticleer.
I mean, you do have to laugh sometimes.
templar555510 , December 12, 2016 at 8:40 amYeps, hypocrisy became a major disease in politics long ago. Now it's time to pay for it, apparently.
sharonsj , December 12, 2016 at 5:11 pmWe in the UK had thirteen years of ' New Labour ' which was Tony Blair's repositioning of the old Labour Party to turn it into a right of centre Thatcherite, neoliberal, let's privatise everything party, thus abandoning the working class in the process . Exactly as Bill Black describes re the Democrats . The problem as I see it is hydra headed , but here are the headings as it were :
1. A political shift to the right is also a psychological one, separating the ' doing okays ' from the ' left behinds ' and in the process reducing ( if not eliminating ) empathy from the ' doing okays ' for the ' left behinds ' . So intentional or otherwise this is a ' divide and rule ' policy, by government that has given rise to Global Trump_vs_deep_state. In the process the electability of a left-wing candidate as a leader – Saunders, Corybyn – has been made impossible under the present set up.
2. Automation. The power of labour hasn't just been weakened by this rightward shift . It has been severely weakened by the onward march of capital embracing new technologies of every type and as we all know none of the productivity gains from this have benefitted labour, nor will they in the future.
3. Bill Black is right a government is not like a household, but the daily message that we ' tax in order to spend ' is a deeply rooted belief system and just trying ( as I do ) to explain why this is not the case is, I imagine , like Copernicus trying to explain the actual motion of the earth around the sun. They just don't get it. It goes against common sense .
The election of Trump is not the beginning of the end it is end of the beginning. This is not a polite, dinner party conversation, it's going to turn ugly rather quickly and, just like the Crash of 2008 no-one will have seen it coming.
John Wright , December 12, 2016 at 8:52 amRe automation: I know the CEOs are pushing replacing people with robots. But none of them can give you an answer to this question: Which robots are going to buy your products? And the fact that none of them can even think this far ahead means they are just as clueless as the New Dems. Maybe they can't see it coming but plenty of us can. I keep telling my friends they better start preparing for any and all emergencies because the future ain't gonna be pretty.
Quanka , December 12, 2016 at 9:00 amTruly the Times will not connect any obvious dots
The Times writes: "Why did the working people, who have always been our base, turn away?" Mr. Manchin said in an interview, recounting the tenor of the dinner conversation.
This is the same Joe Manchin whose daughter, Heather Bresch, heads up Mylan of recent EpiPen monopoly pricing fame.
Maybe Democratic voters are realizing that the elected Democrats are concerned about taking care of their own well-connected class, but working people are a group ignored most of the time and catered to, verbally, only 2/4/6 years.
casino implosion , December 12, 2016 at 11:40 amCan we get a re-post on a previous BB primer on MMT? I studied (bachelors) econ, I have read L. Randal Wray's MMT book but I find the concepts of a sovereign currency hard to explain to outsiders who are mostly inundated with globalism, "free trade" etc.
JEHR , December 12, 2016 at 12:38 pmWray, whatever his importance to the MMT world as a theorist, is a terrible explainer. Cullen Roche (who disagrees with the UMKC economists on the prescriptive points of the theory, such as the job guarantee) does a far better job explaining it to the beginner on his site Pragmatic Capitalism.
NotTimothyGeithner , December 12, 2016 at 1:58 pmSometimes it does not matter how well you explain that a sovereign country need not raise taxes before spending can take place because some people will never change their beliefs no matter how well those beliefs are challenged. It is almost as difficult as trying to change someone's religious beliefs.
Barry , December 12, 2016 at 7:48 pmU.S. level sovereign countries. Russia could do it. Brazil and Indonesia could, but most "sovereign" countries would have problems with international trade if they tried this. Iran maybe could do it.
I fear many people believe the U.S. is a higher character version of the UK or France, so when you try to explain this, they don't quite grasp the U.S. is a continent spanning power and don't grasp why the dollar has value. The U.S. isn't the indispensable nation. It's the nation that can check out. Other nation states don't have this luxury. Despite the decline of industrial production, the U.S. makes that or could easily. American exceptionalism isn't the moral garbage Obama pushes. It's sovereignty in the modern world.
UserFriendly , December 12, 2016 at 9:42 pmTry Bill Mitchell – his blog is on the blogroll on the right
He even has weekly tests to see if you have got the concept!oh , December 12, 2016 at 9:13 amFor people without a background in Econ I highly recommend theses youtube playlists. They are filtered into different categories and are very good explainers.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWXGA051bB7uXlvsiGjvOxw/playlists
John k , December 12, 2016 at 9:17 amThe Dems are hoping that they'll be back in office as soon as the Repubs screw up. And it's quite possible since people don't have a choice other that the duopoly. We have to start building other parties to give ourselves a choice. But will we do it? How?
HotFlash , December 12, 2016 at 9:17 amThey didn't lose because more people voted rep.
They lost because 10mm that voted for big o in 2008 stayed home, didn't vote for anybody for pres, or went 3rd party in other words, ABC, or anybody but Clinton.
A few will some day emulate Bernie, but this leap of faith means no banker money. Not many of these senior dems
new blood, please!NotTimothyGeithner , December 12, 2016 at 9:45 amI find the spectacle of these despicable excuses for Senators being deeply concerned for their own job security quite heart-warming. Thanks, Prof Black, goes great with coffee.
But why, oh why, if they are that scared about their jobs, can't they get a clue? Are they still afraid of Hillary? Afraid that they would have to do honest work? Or do they still truly believe that the working class is just muttons?
DJG , December 12, 2016 at 9:25 amThere aren't corporate board jobs waiting for losers without years of direct labor on behalf of corporate backers. Backbenchers who simply enjoy the celebrity of DC and follow corporate directives aren't relevant once they lose.
Certain ones retire to avoid the stench of losing (Evan Bayh, now officially a loser) and can manage decent jobs, but what does a loser bring to corporate pr especially when they are replaceable faces? A retired astronaut will come cheaper and present far less chance of scandal.
ChrisAtRU , December 12, 2016 at 9:28 amI'm detecting a new meme: Clarion
And the Democrats already keep trying that same old trick of hating their base. Heidi Heitkamp is about as far right as one can go. What's next? Resurrecting Pinochet to run in Florida?
John Wright , December 12, 2016 at 10:29 amAs if on cue, #TheLastCourtJesterOfTheNeoLiberalCrown has (of course) chimed in this morning with more weep-worthy analysis:
Warning: May cause severe eye-rolling (at the very least).
fresno dan , December 12, 2016 at 10:59 amThanks for the warning.
I did click on the link, and the Krugman's first sentence was "The CIA, according to The Washington Post, has now determined that hackers working for the Russian government worked to tilt the 2016 election to Donald Trump."
At least Krugman didn't write, "According to reliable sources" as many people would not view the CIA and WaPo as reliable sources.
The thrust of the Krugman op-ed is that Clinton lost by such a small margin in some states, it could have been the alleged Russian influence that made the difference.
And it could have been because she was a lousy candidate with many concerns about her judgment and ethics (Libya, Iraq, Clinton Foundation, 150K Wall Street speeches, possible selling of favors during SOS, email evidence destruction, cheating on a debate with prior knowledge of debate questions from Donna Brazile, for TPP then against it.).
Krugman should be taking the Democratic leadership to task for foisting their marginal candidate on the electorate and the failure of the existing Democratic President to do much for the voters in his eight years in office.
I remember going to a lecture/book signing by Paul Krugman about 12 years ago and he seemed to be a decent and thoughtful academic.
Perhaps winning the Nobel branded economics prize was not good for him?
Or maybe there is something in the drinking water at the Times, that like the Shadow, has the ability to "cloud men's minds"?
thesaucymugwump , December 12, 2016 at 9:43 amJohn Wright
December 12, 2016 at 10:29 amI view Krugman the same way I view the inquisitors of the Holy Roman Empire – they are the "true" believers, and as such have a duty to defend the sacredness of the church (i.e., the democratic party – it is INCAPABLE OF ERROR).
Krugman's indoctrination into the religion of economics would put the indoctrination of Jesuits to shame. Krugman is simply incapable of examining his indoctrination and in that respect can't even match Greenspan, who at least owned up to the flaw in his (Greenspan's) ideology.
Democrats are perfect, ergo any critique of Obama, ACA, employment, droning, et al is racism and any critique of Hillary is sexism – Krugman: ANY disagreement means your stupid.simjam , December 12, 2016 at 9:53 am"Working class people overwhelmingly want to work. Working class males who are unable to find secure, full time work often become depressed and unmarriageable"
As always, Bill Black is spot-on, but the above sentence can be extended by eliminating the words "working class." The reason Trump won is not only because of blue collar workers. White collar workers in jeopardy of losing their job due to H-1B visas heard Trump's promise that he would stop visa abuse.
And Democratic leaders still have not realized that a non-criminal candidate, e.g. Jim Webb, would have trounced Trump due to his sheer normality. They were in too much of a hurry to crown their queen. Joe "more of the same" Biden is not the answer.
The Democratic Party might disappear for the most part unless it dumps identity politics and re-embraces workers and unions.
Jim Webb / Tulsi Gabbard in 2020.
Eureka Springs , December 12, 2016 at 9:58 amThe problem can be stated quite simply: New Democrats pay close attention to the ministrations of George Soros, AIPAC, and Wall Street. The policies flow from the dollars these entities provide.
NotTimothyGeithner , December 12, 2016 at 10:51 amAbolish the United States Senate.
Knot Galt , December 12, 2016 at 2:19 pmIt's the rationale solution. I believe even indirect elections would produce a better class of Senators. The pomp of the Senate is corrupting. Each Senator fancies himself or herself President. If Hillary could almost make it and an empty suit such as Obama could make it, the Senator from the great state of (insert state) definitely could, so they need to keep the money spigots open and not offend voters in other states.
Indirectly elected Senators would likely be former state house Speaker types or people who have had more than back benching jobs and never felt the thrill of winning statewide. They wouldn't entertain delusions of becoming President.
An added benefit is people would pay more attention to state house races. Fixing potholes would not be sufficient for reelection.
Altandmain , December 12, 2016 at 10:05 amSenate corruption is not about pomp as it is really about Citizens United. That senators have weak malleable egos that money easily corrupts is disguised by the pomp of the Senate.
Anyone who has ever run for local or state public office knows that local races are treated like the bush leagues and minor leagues of baseball where the campaign manager acts like a scout for the party apparatus. Each party has their loyalists and, to borrow a great metaphor, Inquisition-era Klugmans, who guard the gates and dole out monies to influence the local media and voters.
Thrown to the wayside are the actual beliefs of democracy; as the religion of money is the only thing recognized. The rationale decision is to reconnect with the ideas of principal. It's not going to be easy. As this article demonstrates, everyone involved in it is completely void of any principal thought.
And yet I wonder. Bill Black's critique and commentators on this post provide evidence that general principals are thought about. How then, could indirect elections tap into this vein and eschew our vacuous and archaic Senator class?
rd , December 12, 2016 at 11:40 amThe existing Democratic leadership should be forced to resign in disgrace.
They claimed that veering to the center and peddling candidates like Clinton would be more "electable". That has not proven to be the case.
The cruel reality is that they won't go without a fight. They're not public servants. They only care about themselves.
TK421 , December 12, 2016 at 1:06 pmThe House Democrats re-elected Pelosi and company virtually unchallenged. I think they are so used to losing that they view keeping majorities in the east and west coast states as victory.
Denis Drew , December 12, 2016 at 10:46 amWhen centrism fails, they'll try conservativism. People like that only do the right thing after all else has failed.
rd , December 12, 2016 at 11:25 amOne interesting path to bring left out labor back?
Just read that Trump stacked NLRB could walk back teaching and research assistants category as employees. Hey; we know states may conduct their own union certification setups for farm workers because farm workers were left off FDR's ship.
https://onlabor.org/2016/12/09/what-will-a-trump-nlrb-mean-for-graduate-teaching-and-research-assistants/HEY! THAT MEANS THAT ANY CATEGORY OF WORKERS DEFINED OUTSIDE THE FED SETUP IS ELIGIBLE FOR SEPARATE STATE LABOR ORGANIZING SETUP!!!!!!!!!!!!
State labor setup could add something oh, so every day practicable. State NLRB substitute could MANDATE certification elections upon a finding of union busting. States should also take union busting as seriously in criminal law as fed takes taking a movie in the movies - that FBI warning on your DVD comes alive and you are gone for couple of years if caught.
But mandating certification elections has so much more an everyday, natural businesslike feel that it could sail relatively smoothly through state legislatures. Nota bene: Wisconsin mandates re-certification of public employees unions annually (51% of membership required; not just voters) - nothing too alien about mandating union elections.
State set up might ACTUALLY go the last practical mile and actually force employers to actually bargain with certified unions - which refusal to bargain remains the last impassable barrier associated with the fed no-enforcement mechanism. See Donald Trump in Vegas.
See: A HANDBOOK ON THE CALIFORNIA AGRICULTURAL LABOR RELATIONS LAW (35 page)
for an example (maybe unique) of a state fully replicating federal labor law for a left out segment of workers.
https://www.alrb.ca.gov/content/pdfs/formspublications/handbook/handbook0207.pdfrd , December 12, 2016 at 11:39 amClassic tone-deafness
So I think one of the main issues out there is even understanding what middle-class means. A key example of this can be found in this piece where the difficulties that Swiss watch makers are facing is because of the struggling middle-class. Completely baffling I have never known anybody in the "middle class" to even be thinking of buying a Rolex Oyster watch. There are many other things that they would do with $5k before buying a watch.
I think the media and policy makers are mistaking the struggles of people who are making over $250k a year (or local equivalent) as the struggles of the middle class.
NotTimothyGeithner , December 12, 2016 at 12:13 pmI think this is an interesting column discussing whether or not economists should be focused as much on income distribution as total income growth. I think what the Democratic party has completely missed is that the period fo time that the Trump voters view as "When America Was Great" was a period when GDP growth was high (3%-4%) but more importantly, a record percentage of it was being allocated to the middle-class.
Trump's big challenge will be routing the current 3% GDP growth to his voters as he has promised to. I have not seen or heard any concrete policy proposals that will accomplish this, so there should be a yawning wide door for the Democrats to march through 2 and 4 years from now if they can figure out how to turn on the light to discover where that door is. Right now the Democrats are just fighting with the Republicans on how the money should be distributed among the top 10% instead of looking at revisiting their policies form scratch.
Sanders was on the right track, but went to far on key things such as free university. I think most Americans would agree that college should have some value that is paid for, but it should be much less than $60k/year tuition. The rest of the developed world doesn't have massive student debt issues because their colleges and universities are typically in the $3k to $20k/year tuition and many professional programs (lawyers, doctors etc.) are structured as long undergraduate programs instead of 4-year undergraduate program just being a weeding out process before you even get into the professional program.
JustAnObserver , December 12, 2016 at 11:39 amFree college is popular. Most people went to free public schools. Your argument against college is the same argument against elementary school. If you want more STEM graduates as a society, pay for it.
juliania , December 12, 2016 at 2:12 pmOne small quibble: IMHO it is an issue of left vs. right. Unfortunately the US has no `left' and the only options ever presented are right vs. even-further-right.
Gaylord , December 12, 2016 at 11:47 am"Second, the issue is generally not who "leans to the right." Indeed, the 2016 election should have made clear to the paper the severe limits on the usefulness of the terms "right" and "left" in explaining U.S. elections. Jobs are not a right v. left issue."
Kris Aman , December 12, 2016 at 12:43 pmDems are owned by the banks, so they are helping to rob us.
Arizona Slim , December 12, 2016 at 12:48 pmUntil Democrat Party leadership disavows their neoliberal, financial strip-mining, progressive voters are challenged by identity politics. How can one remain a Democratic loyalist under those circumstances?
In an article today on medical patents, drug profits and march-in rights, the NY Times created a video. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/11/us/retro-report-medical-patents-profits.html
The video begins with the March of Dimes funded development of the polio vaccine. Edward Murrow asks Jonas Salk, "Who owns the patent on this vaccine?" Salk famously answered, "The people, I'd say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
The video ends with his Salk's son repeating what his father said to him: "What is more important? The human value of the dollar or the dollar value of the human?"
These questions are not valid when corporate oligarchs control the puppet strings of both political parties.
Presumably, that's because neoliberals have bought into the Chicago School theory of human capital, "the stock of knowledge, habits, social and personality attributes, including creativity, embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_capital
Since economic value is intended for the shareholder, neoclassical and neoliberal policies are intended to achieve the same outcome: to decrease the dollar value of the human.
fosforos , December 12, 2016 at 1:10 pmAll of Benjamin Franklin's inventions went into the public domain.
NotTimothyGeithner , December 12, 2016 at 1:32 pmProf Black says that Al Gore is "the [co]leader of the New Democrats." That was true in 1988-1992. But some people sometimes learn a thing or two over a quarter-century. In Gore's case, he learned something yuuuge: that global warming is the central issue of our time for *everyone*. Yet Prof. Black, the Democrats new, old, and middleaged, every single commenter on this posting, not to mention the Five coal-state Senators whining about "the economy," not a one of all of them had a single word about the most important (perhaps the *only* important issue) of our times. Does anyone doubt that, had the Democrats been forced to nominate him in the contested convention that I had so hoped for, the campaign, its outcome, and our present discussion would be quite different?
Dave , December 12, 2016 at 8:43 pmI believe Gore was a less talented version of his father under the spell of Tipper who was usually on a crusade against naughty language. Left to his own devices, Gore is alright, but it takes him a while. He was garbage in 2000.
larry silber , December 12, 2016 at 1:30 pmEeyore Lieberman on the ticket is what did him in.
jackiebass , December 13, 2016 at 6:33 amWow! I respect Bill Black,so much so that if I was a billionaire respite with household name recognition to promote my ascension to the big house, my cabinet would have hopefully been blessed with his inclusion. I get the monetary sovereignty reality and am equally frustrated over the disconnect most people have digesting the difference between public and private debt. Unfortunately long standing cultural beliefs continually propogandized are hard to change, so without a very established credentialed leader, like maybe some of those new democats, and a host of other well respected influential cohorts supporting this counter intuitive reversal of perception, the reality that our governments finances are nothing akin to a households will only be reckognized by a very small group of open minded heterodox academics and truth seeking objective journalists, like the folks here at Naked Capitalism. I assume some unsavory corporate benefactors of energy , banking, and the sometimes comically nefarious cast of charachters running the various military industrial enterprises, obviously dependent upon government accomodations, contracts, and unlimited revolving door exposures, must have some inherent comprehension of the governments monetary sovereignty. Though i am sure, just like justice and law, to them its two tier. Whether we want to admit it or not, class is a big divider, and those benefitting from our current insanity stand on some shaky shoulders. They need institutions that are self affirming and equally prescribed to regardless of class. Religion helps the downtrodden with hope and morality; equally comforting to the plutocrats that be are the multiple arenas upholding assumptions espousing limited federal government coffers, conforming the masses to be humble and aquiescent, but more importantly incentivizes a hard working competitive ethic that the powers that be easily exploit for ever more profits.
Now the divergence between me and Professor Black comes where he implores that people just want to work, anotherwords have a secure job. What that job is and what it pays isnt the priority, the idea they have a structured format to adhere to and anchor their societal existence is whats paramount. I dont buy it! . I get it, here at Naked Capitalism isnt the place for anecdotal exploits, so i dont want to bore anybody with my angry history. But experiences do correspond to attitudes and policy persuasions. Briefly, I own a small business, I hate it, I simply have to continue with it because otherwise I am in the street. The Great Recession gutted my savings, opportunities, and networks, while age, personal obligations, and finances precludes any restructuring. Surely many middle aged middle class americans share my frustrations, and the future isnt looking any brighter. That being said, work for the sake of doing something integrated for a minimal pay check to stay relevant and in the "system" isnt what's needed. Productive opportunities that engage those that are idle and prone to self destructive behaviors might be socially responsible, and obviously our federal government can provide funding for that, even though this cooperative idea might sound too much like socialism. Young people surely need educational opportunities and structured paths to engage in that will lead to either being productive or aid searching for better sustainable ventures that balance our proclivity to turn nature into profits for the few. Point is, obviously society is a growth in progress and each new generation needs guidance finding ways to spend time assuring they and their societal members are continuing to build upon and improve the quality of everybodies lives. Sometimes profit can be a great motivator for this, and other times not. I am not sure if Prof. Black is expanding his definition of work. Maybe instead of getting into debt for an education, vocational or academic, people should be paid a living wage to receive an education at the beginning of their occupational lives, or like me, they need help restructuring due to public policy that destroyed their economic and occupational existences.. Bernie tried to introduce these concepts, but fear of deficits and lacking funds took center stage. Bernie, who obviously knows the truth because of Stephanie Kelton, got cold feet with regards to attempting an honest discusion, reverting instead to increased taxing to find funding. Sorry , until the definition of "work" is broadened, i'm not in favor of collectively indoctrinating unfortunate able bodied persons into a government work program that serves as a wage floor for some make for work job. Something like the Orange Oompa Loompa's proposed border wall? The entire concept sounds way too Orwelian for me.New Democrats are really moderate republicans. For the democrat party to survive and get back their base, they have to adopt progressive democrat ideas. Electing Schumer as their senate leader is a mistake. He represents all that is bad about the democrat party. People are tired of being screwed by Neoliberal policies. We need a new deal for the 99%. Those voters that were conned by Trump are in for a rude awaking, and it won't take too long. American voters are very fickle. Not long ago the republican party was portrayed as on life support. It didn't take long for that to change. If democrats are smart they will quit living in the past and become more progressive. They only need to support their base to make big changes happen.
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Michael December 10, 2016 at 10:28 pm
johnnygl December 10, 2016 at 8:40 amEllison is talking about starting the same sort of thing again with the 50-state strategy, and yeah, it's gonna pay off fast and big.
Jim Haygood December 10, 2016 at 9:01 amhttp://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/how-the-democratic-party-lost-its-way-214514
Decent read from a democrat candidate in NC who ran for congress and got no help from DCCC. Makes larger point about how they need to built out the organization with training, infrastructure for campaigns. One remarkable bit is how there was a seat in TX district that hillary clinton won and the party didn't even field a candidate!
integer December 10, 2016 at 11:17 amA similar story about the final days of the SS Clintanic :
"Jake Sullivan, Clinton's policy director, was the only one in Clinton's inner circle who kept saying she would likely lose, despite the sanguine polling," Glenn Thrush says, citing Sullivan's friends.
"He was also the only one of the dozen aides who dialed in for Clinton's daily scheduling call who kept on asking if it wasn't a good idea for her to spend more time in the Midwestern swing states in the closing days of the campaign."
"They spent far more time debating whether or not Clinton should visit Texas and Arizona, two states they knew she had little chance of winning, in order to get good press," Thrush says. Just a week before Election Day, Clinton made a campaign stop in Tempe, Arizona.
Who knows whether the NYT's ten months of daily fake news about "inevitable Hillary" misled the campaign, or the campaign misled the NYT?
One is reminded of the old nautical story about an imperious captain sailing on into a wall of clouds, as the worried navigator watches the barometer dropping to 28 inches of mercury.
The NYT's job is to inject more mercury - problem solved! (we thought)
johnnygl December 10, 2016 at 1:05 pmStuart Eizenstat , an Israel lobbyist with the law firm Covington and Burling , seemed to find it worthwhile to spend time emailing Jake Sullivan .
cwaltz December 10, 2016 at 1:27 pmBuilding on lambert's favorite quote from atrios "they had ONE job!". Anecdotes like this from politico really emphasize how they literally stopped trying to elect other democrats. It was ALL about clinton and little else mattered. There was NO plan B!
Clinton herself had a spat with other top party officials who wanted to run against Trump as emblematic of where crazy repubs were headed. Clinton said, 'no, be nice to republicans, only Trump matters and we want their voters.'
The Clintons happily sacrificed the whole party to save themselves and in the end, they couldn't even accomplish THAT. What amazes me is that the chokehold that the Clintons had(still have?) was so tight that the party let it happen!
Personally I would like to see the Democratic Party go the way of the Whigs. They don't deserve my time and effort when the elite go out of their way to stack the deck.
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Dec 11, 2016 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
2016 Post Mortem
- GOP gained ground in middle-class communities in 2016 Pew Research. Important.
- How Trump Broke the Blue Wall Cook Political Report. Also important.
- The 3 different things we talk about when we talk about "Trump voters" Matt Yglesias, Vox. Actually worth a read!
- Jill Stein's Pennsylvania recount request: Federal judge to rule by Monday Billy Penn. And the judge is not happy.
- Wisconsin Recount Results Day 10: 95% In, But Where's Milwaukee & Madison? Heavy
- Recount mess: What if Michigan had held the key to election? Detroit Free Press
- Hillary Clinton blew the most winnable election in modern American history. And it's her own fault. The Week. A bit stale, but a useful bill of particulars.
- How the Democratic Party Lost Its Way Politico. Sounds like spreadsheets are going for the Democrats what PowerPoint did for the Pentagon.
- Is the Democratic party imploding? Medium. Pre-Russki eruption, but interesting nonetheless.
- Louisiana Runoffs Increase Republican Majorities in Senate and House Roll Call
- Meet the Democrats' proto-Trumps Politico. "In three major states with a governor's mansion up for grabs in 2018, a big-name, politically active billionaire or multimillionaire is taking steps toward a run - [Democrat] donors looking to take matters into their own hands after 2016's gutting losses."
- DNC candidates defer to unity commission on eliminating superdelegates Politico. Anybody who fulminates against the electoral college who also supported Superdelegates in the Democrat primary should sit down.
Trump Transition
The Evidence to Prove the Russian Hack emptywheel. The headline is a bit off, since the post's subject is really the evidence required to prove the Russian hack. Some of which does exist. That said, this is an excellent summary of the state of play. I take issue with one point:
Crowdstrike reported that GRU also hacked the DNC. As it explains, GRU does this by sending someone something that looks like an email password update, but which instead is a fake site designed to get someone to hand over their password. The reason this claim is strong is because people at the DNC say this happened to them.
First, CrowdStrike is a private security firm, so there's a high likelihood they're talking their book, Beltway IT being what it is. Second, a result (DNC got phished) isn't "strong" proof of a claim (GRU did the phishing). We live in a world where 12-year-olds know how to do email phishing, and a world where professional phishing operations can camouflage themselves as whoever they like. So color me skeptical absent some unpacking on this point. A second post from emptywheel, Unpacking the New CIA Leak: Don't Ignore the Aluminum Tube Footnote , is also well worth a read.
- FBI and CIA give differing accounts to lawmakers on Russia's motives in 2016 hacks WaPo. WaPo flogging this hard.
- Anonymous Leaks to the WashPost About the CIA's Russia Beliefs Are No Substitute for Evidence The Intercept
- What Are The Hearsay Leaks About "Russian Election Hacking" Attempting To Achieve? Moon of Alabama
- NYT Leads With Russia Hack Conspiracy–Despite 'No Evidence' (in Next-to-Last Paragraph) FAIR
- Did Russian hacking support Trump? Democrats call for hearings USA Today
- The Necessity of Credibility Current Afffairs
- Barack Obama, Donald Trump Forge an Unlikely Rapport WSJ
- Goldman Sachs CEO: Trump Not a Dangerous President Handelsblatt Global
Chief Bromden December 11, 2016 at 7:51 am
Brett December 11, 2016 at 11:29 amGreenwald's take down is another hammer meets nail piece. The CIA are systemic liars. In fact, that's their job to move around in the shadows and deceive. They literally lie about everything. They lied about Iran/Contra, torture programs, their propensity for drug smuggling and dealing, infesting the media with agents, imaginary WMDs that launch war and massacre, mass surveillance of citizens, just to name a few.
They murder, torture, train hired mercenary proxies (who they are often pretending to oppose), stage coups of democratically elected govt.'s, interfere with elections, topple regimes, install ruthless puppet dictators, and generally enslave other nations to western corporate pirates. They are a rogue band of pirates themselves.
This is the agency who are in secret and anonymity, with no verifiable evidence, whispering rumors in the WaPoo and NYTimes' ears that the Russians made Hillary lose. What moron would take the CIA at its word anymore? Much less a major newspaper? Did I miss something, is it 1950 again? Methinks I've picked up the scent of fake news
Conclusion: It isn't the Russians that are interfering with U.S. kangaroo elections, it's the professionals over at the CIA
Elizabeth Burton December 11, 2016 at 12:50 pm+1000
voteforno6 December 11, 2016 at 8:10 amApparently, all the morons who are still screaming about Trump, as if he alone will be in charge of the government and not his GOP handlers. Please keep in mind that the ardent Clinton supporters quite clearly reveal cult behavior, and anything that allows them to continue embracing their belief in their righteousness will be embraced without question or qualm.
johnnygl December 11, 2016 at 8:35 amRe: That supposed Russian interference
I've tried to point out on other blogs just how shaky that story in the Washington Post is, and the response I get is something along the lines of, well, other outlets are also reporting it, so it must be true. It does me no good to point out that this is the same tactic used by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war. People will believe what they want to believe.
JohnnyGL December 11, 2016 at 11:51 amIt may help to point to the history of CIA influence at WaPoo. Counterpunch had a short piece reminding everyone of Operation Mockingbird (going from memory on that name) where CIA had reporters on staff at the paper directly taking orders and simultaneously on CIA payroll.
If questioned about CIA's motivation for hating trump, my best guess is that it is because trump is undermining their project to overthrow assad in syria using nusra rebels. And also because trump wants to be nice to russia.
I think there's some people in the cia that think they played a major role in winning the cold war through their support for mujahadeen rebels in afghanistan. I suspect they think they can beat putin in syria the same way. This is absolutely nutty.
begob December 11, 2016 at 9:07 amThe upside of these overtly political battles among intelligence agencies is that we are eroding away the idea that these are non-partisan institutions without overt political agendas.
There's a large number of people that will see through the facade. Right now, Trump supporters are getting a lesson in how much resistance there can be within the establishment. I'm no Trump supporter, but I think seeing what these institutions are capable of is a useful exercise for all involved.
Ulysses December 11, 2016 at 11:30 amThere's a running battle at the wikipedia article on Fake News Website, where propornot is now considered debunked.
Ulysses December 11, 2016 at 11:36 amApologies if this analysis by Robert Parry has already been shared here:
"What Stengel and various mainstream media outlets appear to be arguing for is the creation of a "Ministry of Truth" managed by mainstream U.S. media outlets and enforced by Google, Facebook and other technology platforms.
In other words, once these supposedly responsible outlets decide what the "truth" is, then questioning that narrative will earn you "virtual" expulsion from the marketplace of ideas, possibly eliminated via algorithms of major search engines or marked with a special app to warn readers not to believe what you say, a sort of yellow Star of David for the Internet age.
And then there's the possibility of more direct (and old-fashioned) government enforcement by launching FBI investigations into media outlets that won't toe the official line. (All of these "solutions" have been advocated in recent weeks.)
On the other hand, if you do toe the official line that comes from Stengel's public diplomacy shop, you stand to get rewarded with government financial support. Stengel disclosed in his interview with Ignatius that his office funds "investigative" journalism projects.
"How should citizens who want a fact-based world combat this assault on truth?" Ignatius asks, adding: "Stengel has approved State Department programs that teach investigative reporting and empower truth-tellers."
The NC lawsuit against WaPo, like the lawsuit of Hedges et al. against provisions of the NDAA, marks a watershed moment for defending free speech in our country! I hope that my oft-expressed belief -- that we will soon need to revive samizdat techniques to preserve truth– may turn ou to be overly pessimistic.
MyLessThanPrimeBeef December 11, 2016 at 11:57 amSorry, I forgot the link!
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-orwellian-war-on-skepticism-battling-fake-news/5559949
Jim Haygood December 11, 2016 at 9:11 amIt's like that quote: When the Clinton tide goes out, you discover who's been swimming naked.
John Merryman December 11, 2016 at 9:47 amAmerica's military empire is an enormous convection cycle, as money falls in while arms sales and global disorder radiate out.
Mr Milk Mustache (John Bolton) as assistant Sec State will help perpetuate and accelerate the grand convective cycle.
The Trumpening December 11, 2016 at 8:15 amJim,
Keep in mind the basis of this capitalist economy is Federal debt. They have to spend it on something. The government doesn't even budget, which is to list priorities and spend according to need/ability. They put together these enormous bills, add enough to get the votes, which don't come cheap and then the prez can only pass or veto.
If they wanted to actually budget, taking the old line item veto as a template, they could break these bills into all their various items, have each legislator assign a percentage value to each one, put them back together in order of preference and the prez would draw the line. "The buck stops here."
That would keep powers separate, with congress prioritizing and the prez individually responsible for deficit spending. It would also totally crash our current "Capitalist" system.
According to a recent posting on Wolf Street, according to records, the Treasury has borrowed 4 trillion more between 2004-15, than can actually be accounted for in spending. This is because it is the borrowing and thus public obligations, which really matter to the powers that be. The generals just get their toys and wars as icing on the cake. It doesn't matter if they win, because there would be less war to spend it on. Eventually they will use "public/private partnerships" to take their piles of public obligations and trade for the rest of the Commons.
Money needs to be understand as a public utility, like roads. We no more own it than we own the section of road we are using. It is like blood, not fat.
johnnygl December 11, 2016 at 10:12 amThe CIA whinging about a right wing president being installed by a foreign power might just be the greatest self-awareness fail ever!
Uahsenaa December 11, 2016 at 10:24 amLOL at that! You'd think they were afraid trump might turn out to be the next Hugo Chavez! They must really, really love their program to help al Qaeda in Syria.
NotTimothyGeithner December 11, 2016 at 11:21 amThere are so many eye-rolling ironies in all this I think my eyeballs might just pop out of their sockets. And the liberals going out of their way to tout the virtues of the CIA the very same organization that never shied from assassinating or overthrowing a leftwing president/prime minister it galls. The CIA lies as a matter of course, and now they're being propped up as the paragons of honesty, simply out of political expediency. Crazy days.
allan December 11, 2016 at 8:25 amModern Democrats simply aren't a political party but fanatics of a professional sports club. If it wasn't the Russians, it would be referees or Bill Belichick at fault. I'm surprised they aren't mentioning "Comrade Nader" at all times.
My guess is donors are annoyed after the 2014 debacle and are having a hard time rationalizing a loss to a reality TV show host with a cameo in Home Alone 2.
Uahsenaa December 11, 2016 at 10:27 amFrom the Amy Walter post mortem on the race in WI:
In fact, Trump's coalition looks remarkably similar to the one that Scott Walker put together in 2014.
It's really a shame that Obama didn't
put on those walking shoeslift a finger to help the public service unions fight Walker.polecat December 11, 2016 at 11:37 amObama in Spartanburg, SC in 2007:
And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America. Because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.
And the Dems wonder why the working class feel betrayed.
Maybe he just couldn't find a pair of comfy shoes
Tertium Squid December 11, 2016 at 9:07 amHol(e)y Shoes .
they glide on water funky bilge water --
ambrit December 11, 2016 at 9:43 amUserFriendly December 11, 2016 at 9:33 amI'd extend that to include the entire DNC "Apologia pro Sancta Hillaria."
aliteralmind December 11, 2016 at 9:43 amThat ProPublica piece ( Suspected of Corruption at Home, Powerful Foreigners Find Refuge in the U.S. Pro Publica) is brutal. Not only do we have to be the shittest corrupt country in the world but we have to be a safe haven for ever other corrupt politician in the world as long as they have $$. Can someone just make it all end? Please. There needs to be a maximum wealth where anything you earn past it just gets automatically redistributed to the poor.
tgs December 11, 2016 at 10:32 amTruth in journalism just got a little bit more difficult:
http://www.johnlaurits.com/2016/12/10/disinformation-bill-propaganda/
temporal December 11, 2016 at 11:50 amThanks for the link – really important and scary things are going in congress concerning 'fake news' and Russian propaganda and HR 6393 is particularly bad. The EU is also taking steps to counter 'fake news' as well. Obama claimed that some form of curation is required – and it is happening quickly. People are suggesting that propornot has been debunked. That does not matter anymore. The Obama regime and the MSM don't care – that have gotten the message out.
And the people behind this are really deranged – check out Adam Schiff calling Tucker Carlson a Kremlin stooge for even suggesting that there is no certainty that Russia leaked the emails to Wikileaks.
After all, the media went all in for Hillary and spent huge amounts of time explaining why Trump is unfit. But they lost.
And now our efforts on behalf of al Queada are failing in Syria and more hysteria ensues. See for example:
Allies Warn Trump Against Cooperating With Russia Over Syria .
Some commentators believe that there is a well-organized large scale effort to normalize the suppression of free speech.
The email saga lost a provable set of sources a long time ago. Before the files were given to Wikileaks it was already too late to determine which people did it. So-called forensic evidence of these computers only tell us that investigators either found evidence of a past compromise or that people want us to believe they did. Since the compromise was determined after the fact, the people with access could have done anything to the computers, including leave a false trail.
The core problem is that since security for all of these machines, including the DNC's email server and most likely many of those from Team R, was nearly non-existent nearly nothing useful can be determined. The time to learn something about a remote attacker, when it's possible at all, is while the machine is being attacked – assuming it has never been compromised before. If the attacker's machine has also been compromised then you know pretty much nothing unless you can get access to it.
As far as physical access protection goes. If the machine has been left on and unattended or is not completely encrypted then the only thing that might help is a 24 hour surveillance camera pointed at the machine.
Forensic evidence in compromised computers is significantly less reliable than DNA and hair samples. It's much too easy for investigators to frame another party by twiddling some bits. Anyone that thinks that even well intentioned physical crime investigators have never gotten convictions with bad or manipulated evidence has been watching and believing way too many crime oriented mysteries. "Blindspot" is not a documentary.
As for projecting behaviors on a country by calling it a "state action", Russia or otherwise, implying that there is no difference between independent and government sponsored actions, that is just silly.
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Dec 07, 2016 | http://crookedtimber.org/2016/11/28/the-day-after-brexit/#comment-699954
kidneystones 12.03.16 at 1:01 pm 117
The Democratic left does not exist. Sanders is an independent who would never have been nominated except to help rubber-stamp the inauguration of the donor-class candidate.The Democrats do not have a left-candidate, or a slate of 'left candidates' around whom a left might coalesce. That's the consequence of national Democratic priorities and the take-over of the party by the Clinton crime family. There are no 'up and coming' Democrats. Those who are talented are spotted and co-opted into the Clinton-controlled machine. The quid pro quo manner of doing business is transparent. Very large sums change hands and almost always according to the laws, in so far as the actual pay-offs are 'incidental' rather than clearly causal.
How many doctoral candidates in their thirties get paid $600 k per year for part-time work and another $300 k per year plus stock options?
All of them, if the doctoral candidate happens to be named Chelsea Clinton. As I noted earlier, Democrats regard outsourcing their interactions with young people and rural voters to Bernie Sanders as a 'solution.'
What people see in Clinton is a candidate willing to travel any distance at any time if the fee for showing up is $225 k for an hour of work, or so; but who couldn't find the time or reason to visit Wisconsin before an election and actually ask people to vote for her.
Yes, it was close. But let's not forget who won and why and how. The president-elect has already stolen parts of the Dem base and now he's after the rest. The traditional Dem coalition is already fractured and if the new president does half as well as he did destroying two political dynasties then Democrats may find themselves in an even deeper whole in 2018.
Like Labour, Democrats need to figure out whether they are the party of the working class, or not.
bob mcmanus 12.03.16 at 4:00 pm 118
There was no (or not much) 'working class surge' for Trump.
Well, there was, in that the internal composition of the Republican vote changed to be more white non-college rural working class and a little less urban college-educated Republicans. I don't know what the numbers are.
This does present possibilities, and was in fact the Clinton/DLC plan, although a plan dating back to the 1960s. The idea is to add to the identity groups that are currently the base of the Democratic Party college-educated urban professional socially progressive but economically moderate Republicans. This preserves the neoliberal system, but should create great economic opportunities for elite blacks, women, Latinos etc who really would rather get rich before socialism.
I am willing to now designate non-college rural whites as a valid minority, without real privilege except very locally, economically moderate but socially conservative. They have been up for grabs to a degree for a long time, and way too much a major topic of discussion, as nobody knows what to do with them, nobody really wants them, but they are very dangerous, as we can see.
I say ship them back to Ireland.
WLGR 12.03.16 at 4:46 pm 119
Hidari @ 108, Matt Christman of the podcast Chapo Trap House made almost this exact point in a recent interview with NYU historian David Parsons on Parsons' podcast The Nostalgia Trap. (Both excellent podcasts, by the way.)The way he put it is that the neoliberal center-left's long-term political project since the '90s, as embodied in figures like the Clintons in the US and Blair in the UK, can be summed up as an effort to redefine the two-party system so that the nominally "left" party becomes a de facto ruling party representing the center-left and center-right, leaving the far right with a dangerously long leash to move the nominally "right" party ever closer toward an outright National Front-style fascist party, and ideally leaving a shattered and demoralized far left as what amounts to an ideological hostage of the center.
Both Clinton's failure to defeat Trump and the Blairites' failure to take Labour back from Corbyn have been setbacks for this project, and in both countries the center-right has largely decided to remain for now in its old electoral bloc with the proto-fascists instead of jumping ship to a "left" party that hasn't yet been fully transformed into a well-oiled machine for neoliberal centrism. (Of course this is also pretty close to Quiggin's three-party system critique, depending on the extent to which one treats the distinction between center-left and center-right as ever having been particularly meaningful in the first place.)
Faustusnotes, bob mcmanus brings up more or less the same litany of actual tangible policy decisions that I and others have brought up in the past, a kind of litany to which a typical center-leftist response is obstinately ignoring it.
Another point US leftists have been making for many months now is that Trump himself isn't actually a fascist, he's only pretending to be one , which you treated as a novel discovery at #79 and to which your response was that Trump's neoliberal administration in practice will make neoliberal Democrats somehow leftist by comparison, which is absolutely incorrect.
He'll do many things more or less exactly the way a Clinton administration would have done them, perhaps in some cases with enough of a superficial far-right veneer to create the perception of contrast (for instance future Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who supports vouchers for religious private schools but otherwise might as well be a member of Democrats for Education Reform) and in some cases with red meat to the far right on issues the neoliberal center doesn't particularly care about (i.e. who the hell knows what if anything he'll do on issues like abortion rights, about which he's been all over the map in the past depending what's in his immediate opportunistic interest).
But appointing figures from places like Goldman Sachs to positions of authority at institutions like the Treasury and the Fed is a thoroughly bipartisan commitment that doesn't make either major US party look any more left-wing or right-wing than the other.
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Dec 07, 2016 | crookedtimber.org
bob mcmanus 12.03.16 at 2:35 am 110
I want to see a political decision to abandon the working classkidneystones 12.03.16 at 1:01 pm ( 117 )NAFTA & TPP etc, big bank bailout no prosecutions, no mortgage relief, grossly inadequate structured and targeted stimulus, low inflation low gov't spending with many gov't jobs cut, insurance and provider friendly whirlpool of an expensive health care plan
The Democratic left does not exist. Sanders is an independent who would never have been nominated except to help rubber-stamp the inauguration of the donor-class candidate.The Democrats do not have a left-candidate, or a slate of 'left candidates' around whom a left might coalesce. That's the consequence of national Democratic priorities and the take-over of the party by the Clinton crime family. There are no 'up and coming' Democrats. Those who are talented are spotted and co-opted into the Clinton-controlled machine. The quid pro quo manner of doing business is transparent. Very large sums change hands and almost always according to the laws, in so far as the actual pay-offs are 'incidental' rather than clearly causal.
How many doctoral candidates in their thirties get paid $600 k per year for part-time work and another $300 k per year plus stock options?
All of them, if the doctoral candidate happens to be named Chelsea Clinton. As I noted earlier, Democrats regard outsourcing their interactions with young people and rural voters to Bernie Sanders as a 'solution.'
What people see in Clinton is a candidate willing to travel any distance at any time if the fee for showing up is $225 k for an hour of work, or so; but who couldn't find the time or reason to visit Wisconsin before an election and actually ask people to vote for her.
Yes, it was close. But let's not forget who won and why and how. The president-elect has already stolen parts of the Dem base and now he's after the rest. The traditional Dem coalition is already fractured and if the new president does half as well as he did destroying two political dynasties then Democrats may find themselves in an even deeper whole in 2018.
Like Labour, Democrats need to figure out whether they are the party of the working class, or not.
bob mcmanus 12.03.16 at 4:00 pm There was no (or not much) 'working class surge' for Trump.
Well, there was, in that the internal composition of the Republican vote changed to be more white non-college rural working class and a little less urban college-educated Republicans. I don't know what the numbers are.
This does present possibilities, and was in fact the Clinton/DLC plan, although a plan dating back to the 1960s. The idea is to add to the identity groups that are currently the base of the Democratic Party college-educated urban professional socially progressive but economically moderate Republicans. This preserves the neoliberal system, but should create great economic opportunities for elite blacks, women, Latinos etc who really would rather get rich before socialism.
I am willing to now designate non-college rural whites as a valid minority, without real privilege except very locally, economically moderate but socially conservative. They have been up for grabs to a degree for a long time, and way too much a major topic of discussion, as nobody knows what to do with them, nobody really wants them, but they are very dangerous, as we can see.
I say ship them back to Ireland.
WLGR 12.03.16 at 4:46 pm ( 119 )
Hidari @ 108, Matt Christman of the podcast Chapo Trap House made almost this exact point in a recent interview with NYU historian David Parsons on Parsons' podcast The Nostalgia Trap. (Both excellent podcasts, by the way.) The way he put it is that the neoliberal center-left's long-term political project since the '90s, as embodied in figures like the Clintons in the US and Blair in the UK, can be summed up as an effort to redefine the two-party system so that the nominally "left" party becomes a de facto ruling party representing the center-left and center-right, leaving the far right with a dangerously long leash to move the nominally "right" party ever closer toward an outright National Front-style fascist party, and ideally leaving a shattered and demoralized far left as what amounts to an ideological hostage of the center. Both Clinton's failure to defeat Trump and the Blairites' failure to take Labour back from Corbyn have been setbacks for this project, and in both countries the center-right has largely decided to remain for now in its old electoral bloc with the proto-fascists instead of jumping ship to a "left" party that hasn't yet been fully transformed into a well-oiled machine for neoliberal centrism. (Of course this is also pretty close to Quiggin's three-party system critique, depending on the extent to which one treats the distinction between center-left and center-right as ever having been particularly meaningful in the first place.)Faustusnotes, bob mcmanus brings up more or less the same litany of actual tangible policy decisions that I and others have brought up in the past, a kind of litany to which a typical center-leftist response is obstinately ignoring it. Another point US leftists have been making for many months now is that Trump himself isn't actually a fascist, he's only pretending to be one , which you treated as a novel discovery at #79 and to which your response was that Trump's neoliberal administration in practice will make neoliberal Democrats somehow leftist by comparison, which is absolutely incorrect. He'll do many things more or less exactly the way a Clinton administration would have done them, perhaps in some cases with enough of a superficial far-right veneer to create the perception of contrast (for instance future Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who supports vouchers for religious private schools but otherwise might as well be a member of Democrats for Education Reform) and in some cases with red meat to the far right on issues the neoliberal center doesn't particularly care about (i.e. who the hell knows what if anything he'll do on issues like abortion rights, about which he's been all over the map in the past depending what's in his immediate opportunistic interest). But appointing figures from places like Goldman Sachs to positions of authority at institutions like the Treasury and the Fed is a thoroughly bipartisan commitment that doesn't make either major US party look any more left-wing or right-wing than the other.
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Dec 02, 2016 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Paul Art November 29, 2016 at 7:14 amIf I was in charge of the DNC and wanted to commission a very cleverly written piece to exonerate the DLC and the New Democrats from the 30 odd years of corruption and self-aggrandizement they indulged in and laughed all the way to the Bank then I would definitely give this chap a call.
I mean, where do we start? No attempt at learning the history of neoliberalism, no attempt at any serious research about how and why it fastened itself into the brains of people like Tony Coelho and Al From, nothing, zilch.
If someone who did not know the history of the DLC read this piece, they would walk away thinking, 'wow, it was all happenstance, it all just happened, no one deliberately set off this run away train'. Sometime in the 90s the 'Left' decided to just pursue identity politics. Amazing.
I would ask the Author to start with the Powell memo and then make an investigation as to why the Democrats then and the DLC later decided to merely sit on their hands when all the forces the Powell memo unleashed proceeded to wreak their havoc in every established institution of the Left, principally the Universities which had always been the bastion of the Progressives. That might be a good starting point.
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Nov 24, 2016 | economistsview.typepad.com
Ron Waller : November 24, 2016 at 08:20 AM
Clearly Keynes and FDR were snake-oil salesmen. The Progressive New Deal Era (1932-80) being the biggest economic muckup in the history of humanity!anne -> Ron Waller ... , November 24, 2016 at 08:36 AMThankfully Friedman came along and made America and the world great again. (Just a slight kink in the model: the global economy teetering on the verge of collapse into fascist revolutions and world war. Nothing a little free-market medicine can't nip in the bud!)
Clearly Keynes and FDR were snake-oil salesmen. The Progressive New Deal Era (1932-80) being the biggest economic muckup in the history of humanity!anne -> Ron Waller ... , November 24, 2016 at 08:40 AM[ Perfectly ironic. ]
http://www.measuringworth.com/growth/Unhandyandy : , November 24, 2016 at 08:31 AMJanuary 15, 2016
Annualized Growth Rates
1933 to 1979 Real GDP = 4.71%
1933 to 1979 Real GDP per capita = 3.39%1980 to 2015 Real GDP = 2.70%
1980 to 2015 Real GDP per capita = 1.69%Maybe a misdiagnosis. People aren't so much voting _for_ snake oil as _against_ the status quo.ilsm : , November 24, 2016 at 08:48 AMFalse analogies. Time for "change", no expectation of "hope" from the bomber* who got the Nobel peace prize. 'Snake oil'+ from both sides in 2016. Add a dash of corruption and rigged system. The corrupt snake oil sales pitch who lost to the unorganized snake oil sales pitch.Choco Bell : , November 24, 2016 at 09:01 AMIf the faux left don't get some logic it needs to be replaced by a leftie of the Trump brand.
*con artist/war monger
+racism/sexism fear mongers
have become "homogeneous", while Lebanon has not thrived as a nationSandwichman : , November 24, 2016 at 09:09 AM
"
~~steve randy waldman~Populist Politicians
From the steve quotation you can guess that USA has thrived thus all our long list of ethnicity-s are mutually dissolving each into the other. As interbreeding proceeds you can see the evidence within Gaussian distribution of each ethnic feature. We are now a nation of one people.
If it then follows that the recent election was not merely all things racism, what was the focus of the candidates?
From my prospective the donkey-s were pushing more of the same conservative party-line straight from 1928. The publicans had deep vested interest in the same failed approach to culture, society, economy, and finance. The same except for one of its hopeful candidates who saw the problem, some of the remedies, and a path towards the control tower using the popular but outdated methods of pandering to our most disgusting instincts of evil. Sure!
His vision is incomplete. He is still searching for the answers, but he is certain that we cannot return to the cold war of 1950. Will he rediscover deflation, full reserve banking, green transportation, a gentler approach to the Luddites?
We need to support his search for a more sustainable USA, a more sustainable planet, a more sustainable
population-al
shrinkage --Snake oil salesmen, eh? One only has to read Minsky on the neoclassical assumptions or, for that matter, Milton Friedman on why nonsense is perfectly fine to know who the big league snake oil salesmen have been. People voting for Brexit and Trump were voting for anything but the snake oil status quo.Peter K. -> Sandwichman ... , November 24, 2016 at 09:18 AMThere are populists and then there are demagogues masquerading as populists. Stamp out the populists with constant ridicule from the crackpot realists and all that will be left are the demagogues who style themselves as populists.
Well said.Denis Drew : , November 24, 2016 at 09:18 AMCUT-AND-PASTE AGAIN :-]Peter K. : , November 24, 2016 at 09:25 AMAs my old Bronx doctor, Seymour Tenzer, put it: "All these histories are bullshit -- I got punched in the chest; that's why I've got a lump." [:-)]
Trump's victory is down to the disappearance of the $800 job for the $400 job. That subtracted from the vote in the black ghettos – and added to the vote in the white ghettos -- both ghettos being far off the radar screen of academic liberals like Hill and O.
I notice the white ghettos because that is me. My old taxi job (much too old now at 72 3/4) was "in-sourced" all over the world to drivers who would work for remarkably less (than the not so great incomes we native born eked out). Today's low skilled jobs go to native and foreign born who willing to show up for $400 (e.g., since Walmart gutted supermarket contracts). Fast food strictly to foreign born who will show up for $290 a week (min wage $400, 1968 -- when per cap income half today's).
Don't expect the 100,000 out of maybe 200,000 Chicago gang age males to show up for a life time of $400/wk servitude. Did I mention, manufacturing was down to 6% of employment 15 years ago -- now 4% (disappearing like farm labor, mostly robo; look to health care for the future?)?
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/gang-wars-at-the-root-of-chicagos-high-murder-rate/6% union density at private employers = 20/10 BP which starves every healthy process in the social body = disappearance of collective bargaining and its institutional concomitants which supply political funding and lobbying equal to oligarchs plus most all the votes ...
... votes: notice? 45% take 10% of overall income -- 45% earn $15/hr or less -- a lot of votes.
The Establishment isn't delivering so you get populists on the left and right. Would Dillow or SWL call Corbyn and Sanders snake oil salesmen?Tom aka Rusty : , November 24, 2016 at 10:27 AMThe centrists do. The corrupt corporate media makes a point to do that.
Make me think of the Middle East where the West destroyed the communists and socialists and so all that was left was the military-backed authoritarians and the mosques with their "snake oil."
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people"
Seems it to difficult to admit globalization damaged US workers, so the fall back is to call workers gullible and racist.
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Nov 23, 2016 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Altandmain November 23, 2016 at 5:09 pmaab November 23, 2016 at 5:30 pmDoes anyone else get the overwhelming impression that the US is heading for an impending collapse or serious decline at least, unless it puts a fight it against the status quo?
Judging by the people who Trump has appointed, it is looking like an ugly situation for the US. If he actually hires people like John Bolton, we will know that a betrayal was certain. While I think that it is probable that he is the lesser evil, he was supposed to avoid neoconservatives and Wall Street types (that Clinton associates herself with).
I find it amazing how tone deaf the Clinton campaign and Democratic Establishment are. Trump and apparently his son in law, no matter what else, are political campaigning geniuses given their accomplishments. For months people were criticizing their lack of experience in politics like a fatal mistake..
I think that no real change is going to happen until someone authentically left wing takes power or if the US collapses.
Daryl November 23, 2016 at 6:09 pmI think it would be a mistake to attribute too much "genius" to Trump and Kushner. It sounds like Kushner exhibited competence, and that's great. But Trump won in great measure because Democratic Party governance eviscerated those communities.
This is akin to how Obama got WAY too much credit for being a brilliant orator. People wanted change in '08 and voted for it. That change agent betrayed them, so they voted for change again this time. Or, more accurately, a lot of Obama voters stayed home, the Republican base held together, and Trump's team found necessary little pockets of ignored voters to energize. But that strategy would never have worked if not for Obama's and Clinton's malfeasance and incompetence. Honestly, Hillary got closer to a win that she had a right to. That ought to be the real story.
It is not clear to me what exactly a collapse entails. The US doesn't have obvious lines to fracture across, like say the USSR did. (I suppose an argument could be made for "cultural regions" like the South, Cascadia etc separating out, but it seems far less likely to happen, even in the case of continuing extreme economic duress and breakdown of democracy/civil rights).
The US is and has been in a serious decline, and will probably continue.
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Nov 22, 2016 | economistsview.typepad.com
Simon Wren-Lewis: Populism and the media :This could be the subtitle of the talk I will be giving later today. I will have more to say in later posts, plus a link to the full text..., but I thought I would make this important point here about why I keep going on about the media. In thinking about Brexit and Trump, talking about the media is not in competition with talking about disenchantment over globalisation and de-industrialisation, but a complement to it.
I don't blame the media for this disenchantment, which is real enough, but for the fact that it is leading people to make choices which are clearly bad for society as a whole, and in many cases will actually make them worse off. They are choices which in an important sense are known to be wrong.
... ... ...
DrDick : November 22, 2016 at 10:38 AM
This piece is right on the money and nails the ultimate failure of our modern corporate media.DeDude : , November 22, 2016 at 10:59 AMModern corporate media is in existence to make more money, not to serve society. Whatever makes (the collective) us more likely to pay attention to the media is what the media will serve up. With the failure of old style media we have to be concerned whether an actual informed political discourse will be possible.Paul Mathis -> DeDude... , November 22, 2016 at 01:23 PMCase in Point: Fake Media. As documented in the WaPo yesterday, two unemployed restaurant workers (McDonalds?) made a fortune with their fake news website that collected ad revenue from the likes of Facebook. They didn't bother with any facts; just published stories they knew would attract right wing extremists.Lili : November 22, 2016 at 11:14 AMThey really worked at their craft using specific language and formats to draw in eyeballs. It worked beyond their wildest expectations and they won't even discuss how much money they made.
These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America http://www.morriscreative.com/6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america/sglover -> Lili... , November 22, 2016 at 05:42 PMSomething tells me there might be a bit of "fake news" creation going on in those shops, eh? But no, let's pull out our hair over some 20-year-old with a Facebook feed. And -- censor! For the greater good, naturally.The Rage : , November 22, 2016 at 12:19 PMThat is because it isn't populism.Peter K. : , November 22, 2016 at 01:13 PMPeter K. -> Peter K.... , November 22, 2016 at 01:20 PM"In thinking about Brexit and Trump, talking about the media is not in competition with talking about disenchantment over globalisation and de-industrialisation, but a complement to it."People are looking for scapegoats and the corrupt corporate media are misleading them, along with politicians. Why are they looking for scapegoats? Not simply because they're wealthy racist Trump supporters who long for the good old days, as the center-left is telling us.
The corrupt corporate media was incredibly unfair to both Bernie Sanders and Jeremby Corbyn but the Blairites and Clinton supporters were okay with that. Sanders was quite good on calling out the media. We need more of that.
The SyFy Channel has a new series called Incorporated about a dystopian America set in 2074 where global climate change has wrecked havoc on politics and society. Giant multinational corporations have stepped in and taken over for governments as America's class divisions have sharpened between the haves and the have-nots. You can watch the first episode online.Teapot : November 22, 2016 at 02:42 PMGlobalization is not Pareto improving. Maybe it could be done in a way that is, but until then, the "media" is correct to paint a disenchanting picturepgl -> Teapot... , November 22, 2016 at 02:58 PMPareto improving assumes we compensates those who lose from globalization. This is well known. What else is well known is we have a terrible track record on this score.JohnH : , November 22, 2016 at 03:05 PM"We know that erecting trade barriers is harmful: the only question is whether in this case it will be pretty harmful or very harmful"...to whom? To the elites? Or to those who voted for Brexit?ken melvin : , November 22, 2016 at 03:30 PMInstead of constantly harping on the illusory 'free trade is a free lunch for all,' 'liberal' economists need to start taking responsibility for not emphasizing or even acknowledging that free trade is not a panacea...it has real downsides for many...and real benefits mostly for elites that negotiated the deals.
Why do 'liberal' economists insist on invalidating the life experience of so many?
Wisdom implies giving a good look to the consequences, and taking measures to ameliorate those negative. Too many were severely harmed by off shoring and illegal immigration. These weren't without consequences and maybe not even, on balance, gainful.Denis Drew :In the future, let those best able to make any necessary sacrifices and adjustments.
As my old Bronx doctor, Seymour Tenzer, put it: "All these histories are bullshit -- I got punched in the chest; that's why I've got a lump."Trump's victory is down to the disappearance of the $800 [a week] job for the $400 job. That subtracted from the vote in the black ghettos – and added to the vote in the white ghettos -- both ghettos being far off the radar screen of academic liberals like Hill and O.
I notice the white ghettos because that is me. My old taxi job (much too old now at 72 3/4) was "in-sourced" all over the world to drivers who would work for remarkably less (than the not so great incomes we native born eked out). Today's low skilled jobs go to native and foreign born who willing to show up for $400 (e.g., since Walmart gutted supermarket contracts). Fast food strictly to foreign born who will show up for $290 a week (min wage $400, 1968 -- when per cap income half today's).
Don't expect the 100,000 out of maybe 200,000 Chicago gang age males to show up for a life time of $400/wk servitude. Did I mention, manufacturing was down to 6% of employment 15 years ago -- now 4% (disappearing like farm labor, mostly robo; look to health care for the future?)?
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/gang-wars-at-the-root-of-chicagos-high-murder-rate/6% union density at private employers = 20/10 BP which starves every healthy process in the social body = disappearance of collective bargaining and its institutional concomitants which supply political funding and lobbying equal to oligarchs plus most all the votes ...
... votes: notice? 45% take 10% of overall income -- 45% earn $15/hr or less -- a lot of votes.
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Nov 23, 2016 | www.economist.com
Legitimation crisis - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_ crisisJump to International crises of legitimacy - Legitimation crisis refers to a decline in the confidence of administrative functions, institutions, or leadership. The term was first introduced in 1973 by Jürgen Habermas, a German sociologist and philosopher. Legitimacy · Theories of legitimacy · Legitimation crisis origin · Historical examples A crisis of legitimacy | The Economist www.economist.com/node/796097
A crisis of legitimacy . People are fed up with politics. Do not blame globalisation for that. Sep 27th 2001 | From the print edition. Timekeeper. Add this article to ... Legitimacy: Legitimation Crises and Its Causes - Political Science Notes www.politicalsciencenotes.com/ legitimacy / legitimacy -legitimation- crises -and-its.../797Causes of Legitimation Crisis : There are several causes or aspects of legitimation crisis . Habermas and several other neo-Marxists, after studying all the aspects of capitalist societies, have concluded that a number of factors are responsible for the legitimation crisis
The Global Crisis of Legitimacy | Stratfor https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100503_global_ crisis _ legitimacy
The Global Crisis of Legitimacy . Geopolitical Weekly. May 4, 2010 | 08:56 GMT. Print. Text Size. By George Friedman. Financial panics are an integral part of ...The Legitimacy Crisis in the United States: A Conceptual Analysis - JStor https://www.jstor.org/stable/800195 by DO Friedrichs - 1980 - Cited by 52 - Related articles A " legitimacy crisis " is widely perceived to exist on the basis of polls of public at- ... causes of a legitimacy crisis may be identified, it has been associated with the
... [PDF] THEORETICAL BASIS OF CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY AND ... - Dialnet https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/3640420.pdf
by GE Reyes - 2010 - Cited by 1 - Related articles Theoretical basis of crisis of legitimacy and implications for less developed countries: Guatemala as a case of study. TENDENCIAS. Revista de la Facultad de ...[PDF] A Crisis of Democratic Legitimacy? It's about Legitimation, Stupid! aei.pitt.edu/63549/1/EPB21-def.pdf
by A Mattelaer - 2014 - Related articles Mar 21, 2014 - generalised crisis in legitimacy , our democracies face a crisis of legitimation: political choices are in dire need of an explanatory narrative that. The Legitimacy Crisis | RealClearPolitics www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/05/08/the_ legitimacy _ crisis _126530.htmlMay 8, 2015 - American government - at all levels - is losing the legitimacy it needs to function. Or, perhaps, some segments of the government have ...
The Global Crisis of Legitimacy of Liberal Democracy - Global ... https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/211/44824.html
The third dimension of the crisis that I identify is the crisis of legitimacy of US hegemony. This, I think, is as serious as the other two crises, since, as an admirer of ...The Crisis of Legitimacy in Africa | Dissent Magazine https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the- crisis-of-legitimacy -in-africa
The Crisis of Legitimacy in Africa. Abiola Irele ▫ Summer 1992. A bleak picture emerges from today's Africa. One glaring aspect is the material deprivation ...
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www.zerohedge.com
Whatever the reason, we agree with the next point he makes, namely the overthrow of "experts" by amateurs.euronews: "Do you think appealing to people's emotions is enough to get elected? Is that a political project?"
Beppe Grillo: "This information never ceases to make the rounds: you don't have a political project, you're not capable, you're imbeciles, amateurs And yet, the amateurs are the ones conquering the world and I'm rejoicing in it because the professionals are the ones who have reduced the world to this state. Hillary Clinton, Obama and all the rest have destroyed democracy and their international policies. If that's the case, it signifies that the experts, economists and intellectuals have completely misunderstood everything, especially if the situation is the way it is. If the EU is what we have today, it means the European dream has evaporated. Brexit and Trump are signs of a huge change. If we manage to understand that, we'll also get to face it."
Bingo, or as Nassim Taleb put its, the "Intellectual-Yet-Idiot" class. It is the elimination of these so-called "experts", most of whom have PhDs or other letters next to their name to cover their insecurity, and who drown every possible medium with their endless, hollow, and constantly wrong chatter, desperate to create a self-congratulatory echo chamber in which their errors are diluted with the errors of their "expert" peers, that will be the biggest challenge for the world as it seeks to break away from the legacy of a fake "expert class" which has brought the entire world to its knees, and has unleashed the biggest political tsunami in modern history.
One thing is certain: the "experts" won't go quietly as the "amateurs" try to retake what is rightfully theirs.
... ... ...Beppe Grillo, Leader of the Five Star Movement
"It's an extraordinary turning point. This corn cob – we can also call Trump that in a nice way – doesn't have particularly outstanding qualities. He was such a target for the media, with such terrifying accusations of sexism and racism, as well as being harassed by the establishment – such as the New York Times – but, in the end, he won."That is a symbol of the tragedy and the apocalypse of traditional information. The television and newspapers are always late and they relay old information. They no longer anticipate anything and they're only just understanding that idiots, the disadvantaged, those who are marginalised – and there are millions of them – use alternative media, such as the Internet, which passes under the radar of television, a medium people no longer use.
"With Trump, exactly the same thing has happened as with my Five Star Movement, which was born of the Internet: the media were taken aback and asked us where we were before. We gathered millions of people in public squares and they marvelled. We became the biggest movement in Italy and journalists and philosophers continued to say that we were benefitting from people's dissatisfaction. We'll get into government and they'll ask themselves how we did it."
euronews
"There is a gap between giving populist speeches and governing a nation."Beppe Grillo
"We want to govern, but we don't want to simply change the power by replacing it with our own. We want a change within civilisation, a change of world vision."We're talking about dematerialised industry, an end to working for money, the start of working for other payment, a universal citizens revenue. If our society is founded on work, what will happen if work disappears? What will we do with millions of people in flux? We have to organise and manage all that."
euronews
"Do you think appealing to people's emotions is enough to get elected? Is that a political project?"Beppe Grillo
"This information never ceases to make the rounds: you don't have a political project, you're not capable, you're imbeciles, amateurs"And yet, the amateurs are the ones conquering the world and I'm rejoicing in it because the professionals are the ones who have reduced the world to this state. Hillary Clinton, Obama and all the rest have destroyed democracy and their international policies.
"If that's the case, it signifies that the experts, economists and intellectuals have completely misunderstood everything, especially if the situation is the way it is. If the EU is what we have today, it means the European dream has evaporated. Brexit and Trump are signs of a huge change. If we manage to understand that, we'll also get to face it."
euronews
"Until now, these anti-establishment movements have come face-to-face with their own limits: as soon as they come to power they seem to lose their capabilities and reason for being. Alexis Tsipras, in Greece, for example "Beppe Grillo
"Yes, I agree."euronews
"Let's take the example of Podemos in Spain. They came within reach of power, then had to backtrack. Why?"Beppe Grillo
"Because there's an outdated way of thinking. Because they think power is managed by forming coalitions or by making agreements with others."From our side, we want to give the tools to the citizens. We have an information system called Rousseau, to which every Italian citizen can subscribe for free. There they can vote in regional and local elections and check what their local MPs are proposing. Absolutely any citizen can even suggest laws in their own name.
"This is something never before directly seen in democracy and neither Tsipras nor Podemos have done it."
euronews
"You said that you're not interested in breaking up the European Union, but rather in profoundly changing it. What can a small group of MEPs do to put into motion such great change?"Beppe Grillo
"The little group of MEPs is making its voice heard, but there are complications In parliament, there are lobby groups and commissions. Parliament decides, but at the same time doesn't decide."We do what we can, in line with our vision of a world based on a circular economy. We put forward the idea of a circular economy as the energy of the future and the proposal has been adopted by the European parliament."
euronews
"One hot topic at the Commission at the moment is the problem of the conflicts of interest concerning certain politicians.
"President Juncker suggested modifying the code of ethics and lengthening the period of abstinence from any private work for former Commission members to three years. Is that enough?"
Beppe Grillo
"I have serious doubts about a potential change in the code of ethics being made by a former minister of a tax haven."
euronews
"You don't think the Commission is legitimate?"Beppe Grillo
"Absolutely not. Particularly because it's a Commission that no one has actually elected. That's what brought us closer to Nigel Farage: a democracy coming from the people."euronews
"You don't regret being allied with Farage?"Beppe Grillo
"It was an alliance of convenience, made to give us enough support to enter parliament. We've always maintained this idea of total autonomy in decision-making, but we united over the common idea of a different Europe, a mosaic of autonomies and sovereignties."I'm not against Europe, but I am against the single currency. Conversely, I am for the idea of a common currency. The words are important: 'common' and 'single' are two different concepts.
"In any case, the UK has demonstrated something that we in Italy couldn't even dream of: organising a clear 'yes-no' referendum."
euronews
"That is 'clear' in terms of the result and not its consequences. In reality, the population is torn. Many people's views have done u-turns."Beppe Grillo
"Whatever happens, the responsibility returns entirely to the British. They made the decision."euronews
"Doesn't it bother you that Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is playing the spoilsport in Europe? Criticising European institutions was your battle horse and now he is flexing his muscles in Brussels."Beppe Grillo
"Renzi has to do that. But he's just copying me and in doing so, strengthens the original."euronews
"Whatever it may be, his position at the head of the government can get him results."Beppe Grillo
"Very well. If he wants to hold a referendum on the euro, he'll have our support. If he wants to leave the Fiscal Stability Treaty – the so-called Fiscal Compact – which was one of our battles, we'll be there."euronews
"In the quarrel over the flexibility of public accounts due to the earthquake and immigration, who are you supporting?"Beppe Grillo
"On that, I share Renzi's position. I have nothing against projects and ideas. I have preconceptions about him. For me, he is completely undeserving of confidence."euronews
"Renzi's negotiating power will also depend on the outcome of the constitutional referendum in December. We'll see whether he sinks or swims."Beppe Grillo
"It's already lost for him."euronews
"If he doesn't win, will you ask for early elections?"Beppe Grillo
"Whatever happens, we want elections because the government as it stands is not legitimate and, as a consequence, neither are we."From this point onwards, the government moves forward simply by approving laws based on how urgent they are. And 90 percent of laws are approved using this method. So what good will it do to reform the Senate to make the process quicker?"
euronews
"Can you see yourself at the head of the Italian government?"Beppe Grillo
"No, no. I was never in the race. Never."euronews
"So, Beppe Grillo is not even a candidate to become prime minister or to take on another official role, if one day the Five Star Movement was to win the elections?"Beppe Grillo
"The time is fast approaching."euronews
"Really? A projection?"Beppe Grillo
"People just need to go and vote. We're sure to win."BabaLooey -> Nemontel •Nov 21, 2016 6:27 AM
euronews: "You don't think the Commission is legitimate?"
Beppe Grillo: "Absolutely not. Particularly because it's a Commission that no one has actually elected. That's what brought us closer to Nigel Farage: a democracy coming from the people."
BOILED DOWN - THAT IS ALL THAT NEEDS TO BE SAID.
Blackhawks •Nov 21, 2016 3:15 AM
Neoliberal Trojan Horse Obama has quite a global legacy. People all over the world are voting for conmen and clowns instead of his endorsed candidates and chosen successor. Having previously exposed the "intellectual-yet-idiot" class, Nassim Taleb unleashes his acerbic tone in 3 painfully "real news" tweets on President Obama's legacy...
Obama:
Protected banksters (largest bonus pool in 2010)
"Helped" Libya
Served AlQaeda/SaudiBarbaria(Syria & Yemen) https://t.co/bcNMhDgmuo- NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) November 19, 2016
2) (Cont) But in the end what Obama did that is unforgivable is increasing centralization in a complex system.
- NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) November 19, 2016
3) Don't fughet Obama is leaving us a Ponzi scheme, added ~8 trillions in debt with rates at 0. If they rise, costs of deficit explode...
- NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) November 20, 2016
LetThemEatRand •Nov 21, 2016 3:20 AM
Maybe it's time for the Europeans to stop sucking American cock. Note that we barely follow your elections. It's time to spread your wings and fly.
Yen Cross -> LetThemEatRand •Nov 21, 2016 3:27 AM
Amen~ The" European Toadies" should also institute " term limits" so those Jean Paul & Draghi][JUNKERS[]- technocratic A-Holes can be done away with!
NuYawkFrankie •Nov 21, 2016 5:07 AM
"The Experts* Destroyed The World" - Beppe Grillo. Never a truer word spoken, Beppe! YOU DA MAN!!! And these "Experts" - these self-described "ELITE" - did so - and are STILL doing so WITH MALICIOUS INTENT - and lining their pockets every fking step of the way!
As the Jason Statham character says in that great Guy Richie movie "Revolver": "If there's ONE thing I've learnt about "Experts", it's that they're expert in FUCK ALL!"
Apart from asset-stripping the economy & robbing the populace blind that is - and giving their countries away to the invader so indigenous populations cant fight back... or PURPOSELY angling for WW3 to hide their criminality behind the ULTIMATE & FINAL smokescreen.
Yep -THAT is how F'KING sick they are. These, my friends, are your "Experts", your self-decribed "Elite" - and Soros is at the head of the parade.
lakecity55 -> NuYawkFrankie •Nov 21, 2016 6:18 AM
You know the old saying, "an expert's a guy from more than 20 miles outside of town."
tuetenueggel •Nov 21, 2016 5:17 AM
Which experts do you mean Beppe ?
All I Kow is that those "experts" are too stupid to piss a hole in the snow.
Oettinger ( not even speaking his mother tongue halfways correct )
Jean clown Juncker ( always drunk too is a kind of well structured day )
Schulz capo (who was too stupid as mayor of a german village so they fucked him out)
Hollande ( lefts are always of lower IQ then right wing people )
Blair ( war criminal )
and thousands more not to be named her ( due to little space availlable )
caesium •Nov 21, 2016 6:35 AM
It NATO collapses so will the Euro project. The project was always American from the start. In recent years it has become a mechanism by which the Poles (and other assorted Eastern Europeans) can extract war guarantees out of the USA, UK and France. It is a total mess and people like Grillo add to the confusion by their flawed analysis.
The bedrock of Italy was always the Catholic faith which the country has abandoned. "The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith" said Hilaire Belloc. A reality that Grillo is unable to grasp.
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dbk 11.18.16 at 6:41 pm 130
Bruce Wilder @102The question is no longer her neoliberalism, but yours. Keep it or throw it away?
I wish this issue was being seriously discussed. Neoliberalism has been disastrous for the Rust Belt, and I think we need to envision a new future for what was once the country's industrial heartland, now little more than its wasteland (cf. "flyover zone" – a pejorative term which inhabitants of the zone are not too stupid to understand perfectly, btw).
The question of what the many millions of often-unionized factory workers, SMEs which supplied them, family farmers (now fully industrialized and owned by corporations), and all those in secondary production and services who once supported them are to actually do in future to earn a decent living is what I believe should really be the subject of debate.
As noted upthread, two factors (or three, I guess) have contributed to this state of despair: offshoring and outsourcing, and technology. The jobs that have been lost will not return, and indeed will be lost in ever greater numbers – just consider what will happen to the trucking sector when self-driving trucks hit the roads sometime in the next 10-20 years (3.5 million truckers; 8.7 in allied jobs).
Medicaid, the CHIP program, the SNAP program and others (including NGOs and private charitable giving) may alleviate some of the suffering, but there is currently no substitute for jobs that would enable men and women to live lives of dignity – a decent place to live, good educations for their children, and a reasonable, secure pension in old age. Near-, at-, and below-minimum wage jobs devoid of any benefits don't allow any of these – at most, they make possible a subsistence life, one which requires continued reliance on public assistance throughout one's lifetime.
In the U.S. (a neoliberal pioneer), poverty is closely linked with inequality and thus, a high GINI coefficient (near that of Turkey); where there is both poverty and a very unequal distribution of resources, this inevitably affects women (and children) and racial (and ethnic) minorities disproportionately. The economic system, racism, sexism, and xenophobia are not separate, stand-alone issues; they are profoundly intertwined.
I appreciate and espouse the goals of identity politics in all their multiplicity, and also understand that the institutions of slavery and sexism predated modern capitalist economies. But really, if you think about it, slavery was defined as ownership, ownership of human capital (which was convertible into cash), and women in many societies throughout history were acquired as part of a financial transaction (either through purchase or through sale), and control of their capital (land, property [farmland, herds], valuables and later, money) often entrusted to a spouse or male guardian. All of these practices were economically-driven, even if the driver wasn't 21st-century capitalism.
Also: Faustusnotes@100
For example Indiana took the ACA Medicaid expansion but did so with additional conditions that make it worse than in neighboring states run by democratic governors.And what states would those be? IL, IA, MI, OH, WI, KY, and TN have Republican governors. Were you thinking pre-2014? pre-2012?
To conclude and return to my original point: what's to become of the Rust Belt in future? Did the Democratic platform include a New New Deal for PA, OH, MI, WI, and IA (to name only the five Rust Belt states Trump flipped)?
kidneystones 11.18.16 at 11:32 pm ( 135 )
Thomas Pickety" Let it be said at once: Trump's victory is primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive governments to deal with this.
Both the Clinton and the Obama administrations frequently went along with the market liberalization launched under Reagan and both Bush presidencies. At times they even outdid them: the financial and commercial deregulation carried out under Clinton is an example. What sealed the deal, though, was the suspicion that the Democrats were too close to Wall Street – and the inability of the Democratic media elite to learn the lessons from the Sanders vote. "
The Guardian
kidneystones 11.18.16 at 11:56 pm 137 ( 137 )
What should have been one comment came out as 4, so apologies on that front.I spent the last week explaining the US election to my students in Japan in pretty much the terms outlined by Lilla and PIketty, so I was delighted to discover these two articles.
Regional inequality and globalization are the principal drivers in Japanese politics, too, along with a number of social drivers. It was therefore very easy to call for a show of hands to identify students studying here in Tokyo who are trying to decide whether or not to return to areas such as Tohoku to build their lives; or remain in Kanto/Tokyo – the NY/Washington/LA of Japan put crudely.
I asked students from regions close to Tohoku how they might feel if the Japanese prime minister decided not to visit the region following Fukushima after the disaster, or preceding an election. The tsunami/nuclear meltdown combined with the Japanese government's uneven response is an apt metaphor for the impact of neo-liberalism/globalization on Japan; and on the US. I then explained that the income inequality in the US was far more severe than that of Japan and that many Americans did not support the export of jobs to China/Mexico.
I then asked the students, particularly those from outlying regions whether they believe Japan needed a leader who would 'bring back Japanese jobs' from Viet Nam and China, etc. Many/most agreed wholeheartedly. I then asked whether they believed Tokyo people treated those outside Kanto as 'inferiors.' Many do.
Piketty may be right regarding Trump's long-term effects on income inequality. He is wrong, I suggest, to argue that Democrats failed to respond to Sanders' support. I contend that in some hypothetical universe the DNC and corrupt Clinton machine could have been torn out, root and branch, within months. As I noted, however, the decision to run HRC effectively unopposed was made several years, at least, before the stark evidence of the consequences of such a decision appeared in sharp relief with Brexit.
Faustusnotes 11.19.16 at 12:14 am 138
Also worth noting is that the rust belts problems are as old as Reagan – even the term dates from the 80s, the issue is so uncool that there is a dire straits song about it. Some portion of the decline of manufacturing there is due to manufacturers shifting to the south, where the anti Union states have an advantage. Also there has been new investment – there were no Japanese car companies in the us in the 1980s, so they are new job creators, yet insufficient to make up the losses. Just as the decline of Virginia coal is due to global forces and corporate stupidity, so the decline of the rust belt is due to long (30 year plus) global forces and corporate decisions that predate the emergence of identity politics.
It's interesting that the clear headed thinkers of the Marxist left, who pride themselves on not being distracted by identity, don't want to talk about these factors when discussing the plight of their cherished white working class. Suddenly it's not the forces of capital and the objective facts of history, but a bunch of whiny black trannies demanding safe spaces and protesting police violence, that drove those towns to ruin.
And what solutions do they think the dems should have proposed? It can't be welfare, since we got the ACA (watered down by representatives of the rust belt states). Is it, seriously, tariffs? Short of going to an election promising w revolution, what should the dems have done? Give us a clear answer so we can see what the alternative to identity politics is.
basil 11.19.16 at 5:11 am
Did this go through?
Thinking with WLGR @15, Yan @81, engels variously above,The construction 'white working class' is a useful governing tool that splits poor people and possible coalitions against the violence of capital. Now, discussion focuses on how some of the least powerful, most vulnerable people in the United States are the perpetrators of a great injustice against racialised and minoritised groups. Such commentary colludes in the pathologisation of the working class, of poor people. Victims are inculpated as the vectors of noxious, atavistic vices while the perpetrators get off with impunity, showing off their multihued, cosmopolitan C-suites and even proposing that their free trade agreements are a form of anti-racist solidarity. Most crucially, such analysis ignores the continuities between a Trumpian dystopia and our satisfactory present.
I get that the tropes around race are easy, and super-available. Privilege confessing is very in vogue as a prophylactic against charges of racism. But does it threaten the structures that produce this abjection – either as embittered, immiserated 'white working class' or as threatened minority group? It is always *those* 'white' people, the South, the Working Class, and never the accusers some of whom are themselves happy to vote for a party that drowns out anti-war protesters with chants of USA! USA!
Race-thinking forecloses the possibility of the coalitions that you imagine, and reproduces ideas of difference in ways that always, always privilege 'whiteness'.
--
Historical examples of ethnic groups becoming 'white', how it was legal and political decision-making that defined the present racial taxonomy, suggest that groups can also lose or have their 'whiteness' threatened. CB has written here about how, in the UK at least, Eastern and Southern Europeans are racialised, and so refused 'whiteness'. JQ has written about southern white minoritisation. Many commentators have pointed that the 'white working class' vote this year looked a lot like a minority vote.
Given the subordination of groups presently defined as 'white working class', I wonder if we could think beyond ethnic and epidermal definition to consider that the impossibility of the American Dream refuses these groups whiteness; i.e the hoped for privileges of racial superiority, much in the same way that African Americans, Latin Americans and other racialised minorities are denied whiteness. Can a poor West Virginian living in a toxified drugged out impoverished landscape really be defined as a carrier of 'white privilege'?
I was first pointed at this by the juxtapositions of racialised working class and immigrants in Imogen Tyler's Revolting Subjects – Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain but this below is a useful short article that takes a historical perspective.
Why the Working Class was Never 'White'
The 'racialisation' of class in Britain has been a consequence of the weakening of 'class' as a political idea since the 1970s – it is a new construction, not an historic one.
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This is not to deny the existence of working-class racism, or to suggest that racism is somehow acceptable if rooted in perceived socio-economic grievances. But it is to suggest that the concept of a 'white working class' needs problematizing, as does the claim that the British working-class was strongly committed to a post-war vision of 'White Britain' analogous to the politics which sustained the idea of a 'White Australia' until the 1960s.
Yes, old, settled neighbourhoods could be profoundly distrustful of outsiders – all outsiders, including the researchers seeking to study them – but, when it came to race, they were internally divided. We certainly hear working-class racist voices – often echoing stock racist complaints about over-crowding, welfare dependency or exploitative landlords and small businessmen, but we don't hear the deep pathological racial fears laid bare in the letters sent to Enoch Powell after his so-called 'Rivers of Blood' speech in 1968 (Whipple, 2009).
But more importantly, we also hear strong anti-racist voices loudly and clearly. At Wallsend on Tyneside, where the researchers were gathering their data just as Powell shot to notoriety, we find workers expressing casual racism, but we also find eloquent expressions of an internationalist, solidaristic perspective in which, crucially, black and white are seen as sharing the same working-class interests.
Racism is denounced as a deliberate capitalist strategy to divide workers against themselves, weakening their ability to challenge those with power over their lives (shipbuilding had long been a very fractious industry and its workers had plenty of experience of the dangers of internal sectarian battles).
To be able to mobilize across across racialised divisions, to have race wither away entirely would, for me, be the beginning of a politics that allowed humanity to deal with the inescapable violence of climate change and corporate power.
*To add to the bibliography – David R. Roediger, Elizabeth D. Esch – The Production of Difference – Race and the Management of Labour, and Denise Ferreira da Silva – Toward a Global Idea of Race. And I have just been pointed at Ian Haney-López, White By Law – The Legal Construction of Race.
Hidari 11.19.16 at 8:16 am 152
FWIW 'merica's constitutional democracy is going to collapse.
Some day - not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies - there is going to be a collapse of the legal and political order and its replacement by something else. If we're lucky, it won't be violent. If we're very lucky, it will lead us to tackle the underlying problems and result in a better, more robust, political system. If we're less lucky, well, then, something worse will happen .
In a 1990 essay, the late Yale political scientist Juan Linz observed that "aside from the United States, only Chile has managed a century and a half of relatively undisturbed constitutional continuity under presidential government - but Chilean democracy broke down in the 1970s."
Linz offered several reasons why presidential systems are so prone to crisis. One particularly important one is the nature of the checks and balances system. Since both the president and the Congress are directly elected by the people, they can both claim to speak for the people. When they have a serious disagreement, according to Linz, "there is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved." The constitution offers no help in these cases, he wrote: "the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate."
In a parliamentary system, deadlocks get resolved. A prime minister who lacks the backing of a parliamentary majority is replaced by a new one who has it. If no such majority can be found, a new election is held and the new parliament picks a leader. It can get a little messy for a period of weeks, but there's simply no possibility of a years-long spell in which the legislative and executive branches glare at each other unproductively.'
http://www.vox.com/2015/3/2/8120063/american-democracy-doomed
Given that the basic point is polarisation (i.e. that both the President and Congress have equally strong arguments to be the the 'voice of the people') and that under the US appalling constitutional set up, there is no way to decide between them, one can easily imagine the so to speak 'hyperpolarisation' of a Trump Presidency as being the straw (or anvil) that breaks the camel's back.
In any case, as I pointed out before, given that the US is increasingly an urbanised country, and the Electoral College was created to protect rural (slave) states, the grotesque electoral result we have just seen is likely to recur, which means more and more Presidents with dubious democratic legitimacy. Thanks to Bush (and Obama) these Presidents will have, at the same time, more and more power.
Eventually something is going to break.
dbk 11.19.16 at 10:39 am ( 153 )
nastywoman @ 150
Just study the program of the 'Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland' or the Program of 'Die Grünen' in Germany (take it through google translate) and you get all the answers you are looking for.No need to run it through google translate, it's available in English on their site. [Or one could refer to the Green Party of the U.S. site/platform, which is very similar in scope and overall philosophy. (www.gp.org).]
I looked at several of their topic areas (Agricultural, Global, Health, Rural) and yes, these are general theses I would support. But they're hardly policy/project proposals for specific regions or communities – the Greens espouse "think global, act local", so programs and projects must be tailored to individual communities and regions.
To return to my original question and answer it myself: I'm forced to conclude that the Democrats did not specifically address the revitalization – rebirth of the Rust Belt in their 2016 platform. Its failure to do so carried a heavy cost that (nearly) all of us will be forced to pay.
Soullite 11.19.16 at 12:46 pm 156
This sub seems to have largely fallen into the psychologically comfortable trap of declaring that everyone who voted against their preferred candidate is racist. It's a view pushed by the neoliberals, who want to maintain he stranglehold of identity politics over the DNC, and it makes upper-class 'intellectuals' feel better about themselves and their betrayal of the filthy, subhuman white underclass (or so they see it).
I expect at this point that Trump will be reelected comfortably. If not only the party itself, but also most of its activists, refuse to actually change, it's more or less inevitable.
You can scream 'those jobs are never coming back!' all you want, but people are never going to accept it. So either you come up with a genuine solution (instead of simply complaining that your opponents solutions won't work; you're partisan and biased, most voters won't believe you), you may as well resign yourself to fascism. Because whining that you don't know what to do won't stop people from lining up behind someone who says that they do have one, whether it'll work or not. Nobody trusts the elite enough to believe them when they say that jobs are never coming back. Nobody trusts the elite at all.
You sound just like the Wiemar elite. No will to solve the problem, but filled with terror at the inevitable result of failing to solve the problem.
mclaren 11.19.16 at 2:37 pm 160
One brutal fact tells us everything we need to know about the Democratic party in 2016: the American Nazi party is running on a platform of free health care to working class people. This means that the American Nazi Party is now running to the left of the Democratic party.
Folks, we have seen this before. Let's not descend in backbiting and recriminations, okay? We've got some commenters charging that other commenters are "mansplaining," meanwhile we've got other commenters claiming that it's economics and not racism/misogyny. It's all of the above.
Back in the 1930s, when the economy collapsed, fascists appeared and took power. Racists also came out of the woodwork, ditto misogynists. Fast forward 80 years, and the same thing has happened all over again. The global economy melted down in 2008 and fascists appeared promising to fix the problems that the pols in power wouldn't because they were too closely tied to the existing (failed) system. Along with the fascists, racists gained power because they were able to scapegoat minorities as the alleged cause of everyone's misery.
None of this is surprising. We have seen it before. Whenever you get a depression in a modern industrial economy, you get scapegoating, racism, and fascists. We know what to do. The problem is that the current Democratic party isn't doing it.
Instead, what we're seeing is a whirlwind of finger-pointing from the Democratic leadership that lost this election and probably let the entire New Deal get rolled back and wiped out. Putin is to blame! Julian Assange is to blame! The biased media are to blame! Voter suppression is to blame! Bernie Sanders is to blame! Jill Stein is to blame! Everyone and anyone except the current out-of-touch influence-peddling elites who currently have run the Democratic party into the ground.
We need the feminists and the black lives matter groups and we also need the green party people and the Bernie Sanders activists. But everyone has to understand that this is not an isolated event. Trump did not just happen by accident. First there was Greece, then there was Brexit, then there was Trump, next it'll be Renzi losing the referendum in Italy and a constitutional crisis there, and after that, Marine Le Pen in France is going to win the first round of elections. (Probably not the presidency, since all the other French parties will band together to stop her, but the National Front is currently polling at 40% of all registered French voters.) And Marine LePen is the real deal, a genuine full-on out-and-out fascist. Not a closet fascist like Steve Bannon, LePen is the full monty with everything but a Hugo Boss suit and the death's heads on the cap.
Does anyone notice a pattern here?
This is an international movement. It is sweeping the world . It is the end of neoliberalism and the start of the era of authoritarian nationalism, and we all need to come together to stamp out the authoritarian part.
Feminists, BLM, black bloc anarchiest anti-globalists, Sandernistas, and, yes, the former Hillary supporters. Because it not just a coincidence that all these things are happening in all these countries at the same time. The bottom 90% of the population in the developed world has been ripped off by a managerial and financial and political class for the last 30 years and they have all noticed that while the world GDP was skyrocketing and international trade agreements were getting signed with zero input from the average citizen, a few people were getting very very rich but nobody else was getting anything.
This hammered people on the bottom, disproportionately African Americans and especially single AA mothers in America. It crushed the blue collar workers. It is wiping out the savings and careers of college-educated white collar workers now, at least, the ones who didn't go to the Ivy League, which is 90% of them.
And the Democratic party is so helpless and so hopeless that it is letting the American Nazi Party run to the left of them on health care, fer cripes sake! We are now in a situation where the American Nazi Party is advocating single-payer nationalized health care, while the former Democratic presidential nominee who just got defeated assured everyone that single-payer "will never, ever happen."
C'mon! Is anyone surprised that Hillary lost? Let's cut the crap with the "Hillary was a flawed candidate" arguments. The plain fact of the matter is that Hillary was running mainly on getting rid of the problems she and her husband created 25 years ago. Hillary promised criminal justice reform and Black Lives Matter-friendly policing policies - and guess who started the mass incarceration trend and gave speeches calling black kids "superpredators" 20 years ago? Hillary promised to fix the problems with the wretched mandate law forcing everyone to buy unaffordable for-profit private insurance with no cost controls - and guess who originally ran for president in 2008 on a policy of health care mandates with no cost controls? Yes, Hillary (ironically, Obama's big surge in popularity as a candidate came when he ran against Hillary from the left, ridiculing helath care mandates). Hillary promises to reform an out-of-control deregulated financial system run amok - and guess who signed all those laws revoking Glass-Steagal and setting up the Securities Trading Modernization Act? Yes, Bill Clinton, and Hillary was right there with him cheering the whole process on.
So pardon me and lots of other folks for being less than impressed by Hillary's trustworthiness and honesty. Run for president by promising to undo the damage you did to the country 25 years ago is (let say) a suboptimal campaign strategy, and a distinctly suboptimal choice of presidential candidate for a party in the same sense that the Hiroshima air defense was suboptimal in 1945.
Calling Hillary an "imperfect candidate" is like calling what happened to the Titanic a "boating accident." Trump was an imperfect candidate. Why did he win?
Because we're back in the 1930s again, the economy has crashed hard and still hasn't recovered (maybe because we still haven't convened a Pecora Commission and jailed a bunch of the thieves, and we also haven't set up any alphabet government job programs like the CCC) so fascists and racists and all kinds of other bottom-feeders are crawling out of the political woodwork to promise to fix the problems that the Democratic party establishment won't.
Rule of thumb: any social or political or economic writer virulently hated by the current Democratic party establishment is someone we should listen to closely right now.Cornel West is at the top of the current Democratic establishment's hate list, and he has got a great article in The Guardian that I think is spot-on:
"The neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang. The political triumph of Donald Trump shattered the establishments in the Democratic and Republican parties – both wedded to the rule of Big Money and to the reign of meretricious politicians."
Glenn Greenwald is another writer who has been showered with more hate by the Democratic establishment recently than even Trump or Steve Bannon, so you know Greenwald is saying something important. He has a great piece in The Intercept on the head-in-the-ground attitude of Democratic elites toward their recent loss:
"It is not an exaggeration to say that the Democratic Party is in shambles as a political force. Not only did it just lose the White House to a wildly unpopular farce of a candidate despite a virtually unified establishment behind it, and not only is it the minority party in both the Senate and the House, but it is getting crushed at historical record rates on the state and local levels as well. Surveying this wreckage last week, party stalwart Matthew Yglesias of Vox minced no words: `the Obama years have created a Democratic Party that's essentially a smoking pile of rubble.'
"One would assume that the operatives and loyalists of such a weak, defeated and wrecked political party would be eager to engage in some introspection and self-critique, and to produce a frank accounting of what they did wrong so as to alter their plight. In the case of 2016 Democrats, one would be quite mistaken."
Last but far from least, Scottish economist Mark Blyth has what looks to me like the single best analysis of the entire global Trump_vs_deep_state tidal wave in Foreign Affairs magazine:
"At the end of World War II, the United States and its allies decided that sustained mass unemployment was an existential threat to capitalism and had to be avoided at all costs. In response, governments everywhere targeted full employment as the master policy variable-trying to get to, and sustain, an unemployment rate of roughly four percent. The problem with doing so, over time, is that targeting any variable long enough undermines the value of the variable itself-a phenomenon known as Goodhart's law. (..)
" what we see [today] is a reversal of power between creditors and debtors as the anti-inflationary regime of the past 30 years undermines itself-what we might call "Goodhart's revenge." In this world, yields compress and creditors fret about their earnings, demanding repayment of debt at all costs. Macro-economically, this makes the situation worse: the debtors can't pay-but politically, and this is crucial-it empowers debtors since they can't pay, won't pay, and still have the right to vote.
"The traditional parties of the center-left and center-right, the builders of this anti-inflationary order, get clobbered in such a world, since they are correctly identified by these debtors as the political backers of those demanding repayment in an already unequal system, and all from those with the least assets. This produces anti-creditor, pro-debtor coalitions-in-waiting that are ripe for the picking by insurgents of the left and the right, which is exactly what has happened.
"In short, to understand the election of Donald Trump we need to listen to the trumpets blowing everywhere in the highly indebted developed countries and the people who vote for them.
"The global revolt against elites is not just driven by revulsion and loss and racism. It's also driven by the global economy itself. This is a global phenomenon that marks one thing above all. The era of neoliberalism is over. The era of neonationalism has just begun."
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-11-15/global-Trump_vs_deep_state
efcdons 11.19.16 at 3:07 pm 161 ( 161 )
Faustusnotes @147You don't live here, do you? I'm really asking a genuine question because the way you are framing the question ("SPECIFICS!!!!!!) suggests you don't. (Just to show my background, born and raised in Australia (In the electoral division of Kooyong, home of Menzies) but I've lived in the US since 2000 in the midwest (MO, OH) and currently in the south (GA))
If this election has taught us anything it's no one cared about "specifics". It was a mood, a feeling which brought trump over the top (and I'm not talking about the "average" trump voter because that is meaningless. The average trunp voter was a republican voter in the south who the Dems will never get so examining their motivations is immaterial to future strategy. I'm talking about the voters in the Upper Midwest from places which voted for Obama twice then switched to trump this year to give him his margin of victory).
trump voters have been pretty clear they don't actually care about the way trump does (or even doesn't) do what he said he would do during the campaign. It was important to them he showed he was "with" people like them. They way he did that was partially racialized (law and order, islamophobia) but also a particular emphasis on blue collar work that focused on the work. Unfortunately these voters, however much you tell them they should suck it up and accept their generations of familial experience as relatively highly paid industrial workers (even if it is something only their fathers and grandfathers experienced because the factories were closing when the voters came of age in the 80s and 90s) is never coming back and they should be happy to retrain as something else, don't want it. They want what their families have had which is secure, paid, benefits rich, blue collar work.
trump's campaign empathized with that feeling just by focusing on the factory jobs as jobs and not as anachronisms that are slowly fading away for whatever reason. Clinton might have been "correct", but these voters didn't want to hear "the truth". And as much as you can complain about how stupid they are for wanting to be lied to, that is the unfortunate reality you, and the Democratic party, have to accept.
The idea they don't want "government help" is ridiculous. They love the government. They just want the government to do things for them and not for other people (which unfortunately includes blah people but also "the coasts", "sillicon valley", etc.). Obama won in 2008 and 2012 in part due to the auto bailout.
trump was offering a "bailout" writ large. Clinton had no (good) counteroffer. It was like the tables were turned. Romney was the one talking about "change" and "restructuring" while Obama was defending keeping what was already there.
"Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course - the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.htmlSo yes. Clinton needed vague promises. She needed something more than retraining and "jobs of the future" and "restructuring". She needed to show she was committed to their way of life, however those voters saw it, and would do something, anything, to keep it alive. trump did that even though his plan won't work. And maybe he'll be punished for it. In 4 years. But in the interim the gop will destroy so many things we need and rely on as well as entrench their power for generations through the Supreme Court.
But really, it was hard for Clinton to be trusted to act like she cared about these peoples' way of life because she (through her husband fairly or unfairly) was associated with some of the larger actions and choices which helped usher in the decline.
Clinton toward the end offered tariffs. But the trump campaign hit back with what turned out to be a pretty strong counter attack – ""How's she going to get tough on China?" said Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro on CNN's Quest Means Business. He notes that some of Clinton's economic advisors have supported TPP or even worked on it. ""
http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/11/news/economy/hillary-clinton-trade/
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Nov 19, 2016 | www.zerohedge.com
Bannon next discusses the "battle line" inside America's great divide.Bannon's vision: an "entirely new political movement", one which drives the conservatives crazy. As to how monetary policy will coexist with fiscal stimulus, Bannon has a simple explanation: he plans to "rebuild everything" courtesy of negative interest rates and cheap debt throughout the world. Those rates may not be negative for too long.He absolutely - mockingly - rejects the idea that this is a racial line. "I'm not a white nationalist, I'm a nationalist. I'm an economic nationalist, " he tells me. " The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f-ed over . If we deliver-" by "we" he means the Trump White House "-we'll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we'll govern for 50 years. That's what the Democrats missed, they were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It's not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about ."
" Like [Andrew] Jackson's populism, we're going to build an entirely new political movement ," he says. "It's everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I'm the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it's the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. 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 - conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement."
How Bannon describes Trump: " an ideal vessel"
It is less than obvious how Bannon, now the official strategic brains of the Trump operation, syncs with his boss, famously not too strategic. When Bannon took over the campaign from Paul Manafort, there were many in the Trump circle who had resigned themselves to the inevitability of the candidate listening to no one . But here too was a Bannon insight: When the campaign seemed most in free fall or disarray, it was perhaps most on target. While Clinton was largely absent from the campaign trail and concentrating on courting her donors, Trump - even after the leak of the grab-them-by-the-pussy audio - was speaking to ever-growing crowds of thirty-five or forty thousand. "He gets it, he gets it intuitively," says Bannon, perhaps still surprised he has found such an ideal vessel. "You have probably the greatest orator since William Jennings Bryan, coupled with an economic populist message and two political parties that are so owned by the donors that they don't speak to their audience. But he speaks in a non-political vernacular, he communicates with these people in a very visceral way. Nobody in the Democratic party listened to his speeches, so they had no idea he was delivering such a compelling and powerful economic message. He shows up 3.5 hours late in Michigan at 1 in the morning and has 35,000 people waiting in the cold. When they got [Clinton] off the donor circuit she went to Temple University and they drew 300 or 400 kids."
Bannon on Murdoch: "Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump"
At that moment, as we talk, there's a knock on the door of Bannon's office, a temporary, impersonal, middle-level executive space with a hodgepodge of chairs for constant impromptu meetings. Sen. Ted Cruz, once the Republican firebrand, now quite a small and unassuming figure, has been waiting patiently for a chat and Bannon excuses himself for a short while. It is clear when we return to our conversation that it is not just the liberal establishment that Bannon feels he has triumphed over, but the conservative one too - not least of all Fox News and its owners, the Murdochs. "They got it more wrong than anybody," he says. " Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump. To him, Trump is a radical. Now they'll go centrist and build the network around Megyn Kelly." Bannon recounts, with no small irony, that when Breitbart attacked Kelly after her challenges to Trump in the initial Republican debate, Fox News chief Roger Ailes - whom Bannon describes as an important mentor, and who Kelly's accusations of sexual harassment would help topple in July - called to defend her. Bannon says he warned Ailes that Kelly would be out to get him too .
Finally, Bannon on how he sees himself in the administration:
Life of Illusion nibiru Nov 18, 2016 2:32 PM ,Bannon now becomes part of a two-headed White House political structure, with Reince Priebus - in and out of Bannon's office as we talk - as chief of staff, in charge of making the trains run on time, reporting to the president, and Bannon as chief strategist, in charge of vision, goals, narrative and plan of attack, reporting to the president too. Add to this the ambitions and whims of the president himself, and the novel circumstance of one who has never held elective office, the agenda of his highly influential family and the end runs of a party significant parts of which were opposed to him, and you have quite a complex court that Bannon will have to finesse to realize his reign of the working man and a trillion dollars in new spending.
"I am," he says, with relish, "Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors."
now that is direct with truthDeathrips Life of Illusion Nov 18, 2016 2:34 PM ," The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f-ed over . If we deliver-" by "we" he means the Trump White House "-we'll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we'll govern for 50 years. That's what the Democrats missed, they were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It's not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about ."
William Jennings Bryan!!!! Bonus Points.PrayingMantis wildbad Nov 18, 2016 3:51 PM ,http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1876-1900/william-jennings-bryan-cro...
Read cross of gold about bimetalism. Gold AND Silver
... I'd say, IMO, Steve Bannon is more than an excellent choice for President Trump's team ... Bannon's education, business, work and military experience speaks highly of his abilities ... I wish the MSM would stop labelling him a white nationalist and concentrate on his successful accomplishments and what he could contribute to Trump's cabinet.Escrava Isaura The Saint Nov 18, 2016 6:11 PM ,........ from wiki ...
Stephen Kevin Bannon was born on November 27, 1953, in Norfolk, Virginia into a working-class, Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats. He graduated from Virginia Tech in 1976 and holds a master's degree in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. In 1983, Bannon received an M.B.A. degree with honors from Harvard Business School.
Bannon was an officer in the United States Navy, serving on the destroyer USS Paul F. Foster as a Surface Warfare Officer in the Pacific Fleet and stateside as a special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations at the Pentagon.
After his military service, Bannon worked at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker in the Mergers & Acquisitions Department. In 1990, Bannon and several colleagues from Goldman Sachs launched Bannon & Co., a boutique investment bank specializing in media. Through Bannon & Co., Bannon negotiated the sale of Castle Rock Entertainment to Ted Turner. As payment, Bannon & Co. accepted a financial stake in five television shows, including Seinfeld. Société Générale purchased Bannon & Co. in 1998.
In 1993, while still managing Bannon & Co., Bannon was made acting director of Earth-science research project Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona. Under Bannon, the project shifted emphasis from researching space exploration and colonization towards pollution and global warming. He left the project in 1995.
After the sale of Bannon & Co., Bannon became an executive producer in the film and media industry in Hollywood, California. He was executive producer for Julie Taymor's 1999 film Titus. Bannon became a partner with entertainment industry executive Jeff Kwatinetz at The Firm, Inc., a film and television management company. In 2004, Bannon made a documentary about Ronald Reagan titled In the Face of Evil. Through the making and screening of this film, Bannon was introduced to Peter Schweizer and publisher Andrew Breitbart. He was involved in the financing and production of a number of films, including Fire from the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman, The Undefeated (on Sarah Palin), and Occupy Unmasked. Bannon also hosts a radio show (Breitbart News Daily) on a Sirius XM satellite radio channel.
Bannon is also executive chairman and co-founder of the Government Accountability Institute, where he helped orchestrate the publication of the book Clinton Cash. In 2015, Bannon was ranked No. 19 on Mediaite's list of the "25 Most Influential in Political News Media 2015".
Bannon convinced Goldman Sachs to invest in a company known as Internet Gaming Entertainment. Following a lawsuit, the company rebranded as Affinity Media and Bannon took over as CEO. From 2007 through 2011, Bannon was chairman and CEO of Affinity Media.
Bannon became a member of the board of Breitbart News. In March 2012, after founder Andrew Breitbart's death, Bannon became executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC, the parent company of Breitbart News. Under his leadership, Breitbart took a more alt-right and nationalistic approach towards its agenda. Bannon declared the website "the platform for the alt-right" in 2016. Bannon identifies as a conservative. Speaking about his role at Breitbart, Bannon said: "We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly 'anti-' the permanent political class."
The New York Times described Breitbart News under Bannon's leadership as a "curiosity of the fringe right wing", with "ideologically driven journalists", that is a source of controversy "over material that has been called misogynist, xenophobic and racist." The newspaper also noted how Breitbart was now a "potent voice" for Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
Bannon: " The globalists gutted the American working class ..the Democrats were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It's not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about ."
Well said. Couldn't agree more.
Bannon: " Like [Andrew] Jackson's populism, we're going to build an entirely new political movement I'm the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan.
Dear Mr. Bannon, it has to be way more than $1trillion in 10 years. Obama's $831 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) didn't make up the difference for all the job lost in 2007/08. Manufacturing alone lost about 9 million jobs since 1979, when it peaked.
Trump needs to go Ronald Reagan 180% deficit spending. If Trump runs 100% like Obama, Trump will fail as well.
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Nov 19, 2016 | www.project-syndicate.org
SANTIAGO – Many of the men and women who turned out for the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund in early October were saying something like this: "Imagine if the Republicans had nominated someone with the same anti-trade views as Trump, minus the insults and the sexual harassment. A populist protectionist would be headed to the White House."
The underlying view is that rising populism on the right and the left, both in the United States and in Europe, is a straightforward consequence of globalization and its unwanted effects: lost jobs and stagnant middle-class incomes. Davos men and women hate this conclusion, but they have embraced it with all the fervor of new converts.
Yet there is an alternative – and more persuasive – view: while economic stagnation helps push upset voters into the populist camp, bad economics is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for bad politics. On the contrary, argues Princeton political scientist Jan-Werner Mueller in his new book : populism is a "permanent shadow" on representative democracy.
Populism is not about taxation (or jobs or income inequality). It is about representation – who gets to speak for the people and how.
Advocates of democracy make some exalted claims on its behalf. As Abraham Lincoln put it at Gettysburg , it is "government of the people, by the people, for the people." But modern representative democracy – or any democracy, for that matter – inevitably falls short of these claims. Voting in an election every four years for candidates chosen by party machines is not exactly what Lincoln's lofty words call to mind.
What populists offer, Mueller says, is to fulfill what the Italian democratic theorist Norberto Bobbio calls the broken promises of democracy. Populists speak and act, claims Mueller, " as if the people could develop a singular judgment,... as if the people were one,... as if the people, if only they empowered the right representatives, could fully master their fates."
Populism rests on a toxic triad: denial of complexity, anti-pluralism, and a crooked version of representation.
Most of us believe that social choices (Build more schools or hospitals? Stimulate or discourage international trade? Liberalize or restrict abortion?) are complex, and that the existence of a plurality of views about what to do is both natural and legitimate. Populists deny this. As Ralf Dahrendorf once put it, populism is simple; democracy is complex. To populists, there is only one right view – that of the people.
If so, the complex mechanisms of liberal democracy, with its emphasis on delegation and representation, are all unnecessary. No need for parliaments endlessly debating: the unitary will of the people can easily be expressed in a single vote. Hence populists' love affair with plebiscites and referenda. Brexit, anyone?
And not just anyone can represent the people. The claim is to exclusive representation. Remember Trump's boast in his address to the Republican National Convention: "I alone can fix it."
Politics is always about morality, Aristotle told us. But populists favor what Mueller calls a particular moralistic interpretation of politics . Those who hold the right view about the world are moral; the rest are immoral, lackeys of a corrupt elite. That was exactly the rhetoric of the late Venezuelan ruler Hugo Chávez. When that failed, and when Chávez's sank his country's economy, there was always US imperialism to blame. So populism is a kind of identity politics. It is always us against them .
Viewed in this light, populism is not a useful corrective to a democracy captured by technocrats and elites, as Marine Le Pen, Rafael Correa, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, or assorted Western intellectuals want you to believe. On the contrary, it is profoundly anti-democratic, and hence a threat to democracy itself.
What is to be done? My take (the prescription is my own, not Mueller's) is that democrats must (and can) beat populists at their own game. The toxic triad can become salutary.
First, acknowledge complexity. The only thing that upsets voters as much as being lied to is being treated like babies. People who lead challenging lives know that the world is complex. They do not mind being told that. They appreciate being spoken to as the grownups they are.
Second, do not treat diversity of views and identities as a problem calling for a technocratic solution. Rather, make respect for such diversity a profoundly moral feature of society. The fact that we are not all the same and we can still get along is a tremendous democratic achievement. Make the case for it. And do not fall for the tired cliché that reason is for democrats and emotion is for populists. Make the case for pluralistic democracy in a way that inspires and stirs emotion.
Third, defend – and update – representation. Leave delegation to complex technical matters. Take advantage of modern technologies to bring other choices – particularly those having to do with the fabric of daily life – closer to voters. Tighten campaign finance laws, regulate lobbying better, and enforce affirmative-action measures to ensure that representatives are of the people and work for the people.
These measures alone will not ensure that all of democracy's broken promises are fulfilled. But we cannot expect a single set of simple actions to solve a complex problem. Nor can we believe that we alone can fix it.
If we believed that, we would be populists. For the sake of democracy, that is precisely what we should not be.
Andrés Velasco, a former presidential candidate and finance minister of Chile, is Professor of Professional Practice in International Development at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. He has taught at Harvard University and New York University, and is the author of numerous studies on international economics and development.
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www.counterpunch.org
What is the Democratic Party's former constituency of labor and progressive reformers to do? Are they to stand by and let the party be captured in Hillary's wake by Robert Rubin's Goldman Sachs-Citigroup gang that backed her and Obama?
The 2016 election sounded the death knell for the identity politics. Its aim was to persuade voters not to think of their identity in economic terms, but to think of themselves as women or as racial and ethnic groups first and foremost, not as having common economic interests. This strategy to distract voters from economic policies has obviously failed...
This election showed that voters have a sense of when they're being lied to. After eight years of Obama's demagogy, pretending to support the people but delivering his constituency to his financial backers on Wall Street. 'Identity politics' has given way to the stronger force of economic distress. Mobilizing identity politics behind a Wall Street program will no longer work."
Michael Hudson
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Nov 19, 2016 | economistsview.typepad.com
RGC : , November 17, 2016 at 07:38 AM
Break Up the Democratic PartyRGC -> im1dc... , November 17, 2016 at 08:42 AMBy Michael Hudson
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
..................
The danger of not taking this opportunity to clean out the party nowThe Democratic Party can save itself only by focusing on economic issues – in a way that reverses its neoliberal stance under Obama, and indeed going back to Bill Clinton's pro-Wall Street administration. The Democrats need to do what Britain's Labour Party did by cleaning out Tony Blair's Thatcherites. As Paul Craig Roberts wrote over the weekend: "Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class is left intact after a revolution against them. We have proof of this throughout South America. Every revolution by the indigenous people has left unmolested the Spanish ruling class, and every revolution has been overthrown by collusion between the ruling class and Washington." Otherwise the Democrats will be left as an empty shell.
Now is the time for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the few other progressives who have not been kept out of office by the DNC to make their move by appointing their own nominees to the DNC. If they fail, the Democratic Party is dead.An indication of how hard the present Democratic Party leadership will fight against this change of allegiance is reflected in their long fight against Bernie Sanders and other progressives going back to Dennis Kucinich. The past five days of MoveOn demonstrations sponsored by Hillary's backer George Soros may be an attempt to preempt the expected push by Bernie's supporters, by backing Howard Dean for head of the DNC while organizing groups to be called on for what may be an American "Maidan Spring."
Perhaps some leading Democrats preferred to lose with their Wall Street candidate Hillary than win with a reformer who would have edged them out of their right-wing positions. But the main problem was hubris. Hillary's coterie thought they could make their own reality. They believed that hundreds of millions of dollars of TV and other advertising could sway voters. But eight years of Obama's rescue of Wall Street instead of the economy was enough for most voters to see how deceptive his promises had been. And they distrusted Hillary's feigned embrace of Bernie's opposition to the TPP.
The Rust Belt swing states that shifted away from backing Obama for the last two terms are not racist states. They voted for Obama twice, after all. But seeing his support Wall Street, they had lost faith in her credibility – and were won by Bernie in his primaries against Hillary.
Donald Trump is thus Obama's legacy. Last week's vote was a backlash. Hillary thought that getting Barack and Michelle Obama to campaign as her surrogates would help, but it turned out to be the kiss of death. Obama egged her on by urging voters to "save his legacy" by supporting her as his Third Term. But voters did not want his legacy of giveaways to the banks, the pharmaceutical and health-insurance monopolies.Most of all, it was Hillary's asking voters to ignore her economic loyalty to Wall Street simply to elect a woman, and her McCarthy-like accusations that Trump was "Putin's candidate" (duly echoed by Paul Krugman). On Wednesday, Obama's former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul tweeted that "Putin intervened in our elections and succeeded." It was as if the Republicans and even the FBI were a kind of fifth column for the KGB. Her receptiveness to cutting back Social Security and steering wage withholding into the stock market did not help – especially her hedge fund campaign contributors. Compulsory health-insurance fees continue to rise for healthy young people. This was the profit center Obamacare offered the health-insurance monopoly.
The anti-Trump rallies mobilized by George Soros and MoveOn look like a preemptive attempt to capture the potential socialist left for the old Clinton divide-and-conquer strategy. The group was defeated five years ago when it tried to enlist Occupy Wall Street as part of the Democratic Party. It's attempt to make a comeback right now should be heard as an urgent call to Bernie's supporters and other "real" Democrats that they need to create an alternative pretty quickly so as not to let "socialism" be captured by Soros and his apparatchiks carried over from the Clinton campaign.
http://michael-hudson.com/2016/11/break-up-the-democratic-party/
"but without shutting out the wealthy, business interests, or US Corporations."RGC -> RGC... , November 17, 2016 at 08:49 AMA very large part needs to be shut out. Or at least FDR thought so:
FDR: I Welcome Their Hatred
So does Bernie:Dan Kervick -> im1dc... , November 17, 2016 at 09:41 AM"Reconstructed" might be a better term. But barging full steam ahead with the Wall Street-friendly Chuck Schumer, as though nothing has happened, seems particularly obtuse on the part of the Democrats to me.im1dc -> im1dc... , November 17, 2016 at 12:19 PMThere is now a growing movement among the Berniecrats to join the Democratic Socialists of America and build it up into a much larger and more influential organization capable of exerting real political pressure on the political process.
"without shutting out the wealthy, business interests, or US Corporations"Peter K. : , November 17, 2016 at 07:52 AMI should have been less opaque and simply added that America is a Capitalist based nation and shutting out its Capitalists, who risk their capital for profit, is exactly like biting the hand that feeds.
Obviously there are evil wealthy people such as that rich women who was caught asking Mitt Romney about 'eliminating, reducing or cutting off benefits to the 47% who refuse to work and earn a living' so her taxes would be cut. Obviously there are evil businesses that are predators and take and do not give back. Obviously there are evil MNC corporations, Apple is in my sites, that refuse to pay their fair share of taxes to run this nation.
But, as obviously there are super kind and nice wealthy people, businesses, and corporations that go out of their way to give back to their communities and the vote for Democrats.
The wealthy, American businesses, and MNC corporations will always be lead, in most places on earth, by those who want lower taxes and less regulation, that's built into the nature of having more and the desire to control it rather than give it to a government. IT IS NOT EVIL.
Accept that concept and you know why I believe the Democrat Party must be a welcoming home for the Capitalist Risk Takers, without any acrimony or embarrassment, but with open arms and respect for what they've accomplished with their lives.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/02/why-liberals-should-support-a-trump-nomination.htmlPinkybum -> Peter K.... , November 17, 2016 at 09:04 AMWhy Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination
By Jonathan Chait
February 5, 2016
8:54 a.m.The initial stupefaction and dismay with which liberals greeted Donald Trump's candidacy have slowly given way to feelings of Schadenfreude- reveling in the suffering of others, in this case the apoplectic members of the Republican Establishment. Are such feelings morally wrong? Or can liberals enjoy the spectacle unleavened by guilt? As Republican voters start actually voting, is it okay to be sad - alarmed, even - by the prospect that the Trump hostile takeover of the GOP may fail?
There are three reasons, in descending order of obviousness, for a liberal to earnestly and patriotically support a Trump Republican nomination. The first, of course, is that he would almost certainly lose. Trump's ability to stay atop the polls for months, even as critics predicted his demise, has given him an aura of voodoo magic that frightens some Democrats. But whatever wizardry Trump has used to defy the laws of political gravity has worked only within his party. Among the electorate as a whole, he is massively - indeed, historically - unpopular, with unfavorable ratings now hovering around 60 percent and a public persona almost perfectly designed to repel the Obama coalition: racial minorities, single women, and college-educated whites. It would take a landscape-altering event like a recession for him to win; even that might not be enough.
Second, a Trump nomination might upend his party. The GOP is a machine that harnesses ethno-nationalistic fear - of communists, criminals, matrimonial gays, terrorists, snooty cultural elites - to win elections and then, once in office, caters to its wealthy donor base. (This is why even a social firebrand like Ted Cruz would privately assure the billionaire investor Paul Singer that he wasn't particularly concerned about gay-marriage laws.) As its voting base has lost college-educated voters and gained blue-collar whites, the fissure between the means by which Republicans attain power and the ends they pursue once they have it has widened.
What has most horrified conservative activists about Trump's rise is how little he or his supporters seem to care about their anti-government ideology. When presented with the candidate's previous support for higher taxes on the rich or single-payer insurance, heresies of the highest order, Trump fans merely shrug. During this campaign, Trump has mostly conformed to party doctrine, but without much conviction. Trump does not mouth the rote conservative formulation that government is failing because it can't work and that the solution is to cut it down to size. Instead, he says it is failing because it is run by idiots and that the solution is for it to instead be run by Trump. About half of Republicans favor higher taxes on the rich, a position that has zero representation among their party's leaders. And those Republicans are the most likely to support Trump.
Trump's candidacy represents, among other things, a revolt by the Republican proletariat against its master class. That is why National Review devoted a cover editorial and 22 columns to denouncing Trump as a heretic to the conservative movement. A Trump nomination might not actually cleave the GOP in two, but it could wreak havoc. If, like me, you think the Republican Party in its current incarnation needs to be burned to the ground and rebuilt anew, Trump is the only one holding a match.
The third reason to prefer a Trump nomination: If he does win, a Trump presidency would probably wind up doing less harm to the country than a Marco Rubio or a Cruz presidency. It might even, possibly, do some good.
The Trump campaign may feel like an off-the-grid surrealistic nightmare, The Man in the High Castle meets Idiocracy. But something like it has happened before. Specifically, it happened in California, a place where things often happen before they happen to the rest of us, in 2003, when Arnold Schwarzenegger won the governorship. At the time, the prospect of Schwarzenegger governing America's largest state struck many of us as just as ghastly as the idea of a Trump presidency seems now. Like Trump, Schwarzenegger came directly to politics from the celebrity world without bothering to inform himself about public policy. He campaigned as a vacuous Man of Action in opposition to the Politicians, breezing by all the specifics as the petty obsessions of his inferiors.
...
I think the takeaway is that Republican politicians lie and lie and lie and lie even about recent history. The exasperating thing to me is the complete inability of a Democratic politician to effectively counter these lies with facts. I wasn't that impressed with Sanders ability to argue effectively to be honest.Peter K. -> Pinkybum... , November 17, 2016 at 09:38 AMMy mind goes back to the abortion question in the last debate. Trump's accusation that Clinton wanted to rip babies out of mother's wombs at 9 months has no basis in medical science or actual practice. However, despite being someone who should be an "expert" on women's issues could not articulate accurately how medically preposterous this notion was or even the facts behind late term abortions and why women need them at all. Surely a politician of Clinton's "skill" would at least have an anecdote ready about a woman who had a late-term abortion.
" The exasperating thing to me is the complete inability of a Democratic politician to effectively counter these lies with facts. "Pinkybum -> Peter K.... , November 17, 2016 at 10:14 AMYes but the election isn't just about that. Hillary was the establishment candidate and the establishment isn't delivering. Trump was the outsider - he took over the Republican party - and it didn't matter that he lies or is obnoxious to a certain type of voter.
I think either Sanders or Obama would have won.
Obama is the establishment candidate. However, Obama has charisma and I think we need more politicians like this. I'm past caring whether or not they are great at policy (apparently Hillary was and she still couldn't argue effectively against Trump!) I want someone who can effectively argue the case for progressive policies. We know progressive policies are the right ones we just need someone who can fight for those policies. They need an encyclopedic knowledge of the shit Republicans have done, why it is wrong and how progressive policies have worked for the betterment of the 99 percent.Peter K. -> Pinkybum... , November 17, 2016 at 10:48 AMObama campaigned on hope and change, not that everything is great and shut up and don't complain. Plus he didn't have scandals hanging over him.RGC : , November 17, 2016 at 09:12 AMMy basic point is that center-left pundits like Chait were very wrong about Trump and the election. They were probably wrong about Sanders as well.
November 15, 2016RGC -> RGC... , November 17, 2016 at 09:27 AM
The Roosevelt InstituteThe unheard winning and bold economic agenda
Findings from Roosevelt Institute's Election night survey
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Economic change election and the working class voteThroughout this election cycle, polling conducted on behalf of the Roosevelt Institute and others revealed the potential of a "rewrite the rules" narrative, message and bold policy agenda to win broad and deep public support. It fit the times where voters wanted change and were tired of corporate interests dominating politics at the expense of the middle class.
It was also appealing to swing groups including white college graduates and white working class women. True, Trump always enjoyed big margins among the white working class men who identified with him, and they turned out for him early and in growing numbers. But there were points where Clinton was outperforming Obama with white working class women.
The data does not support that idea that the white working class was inevitably lost, as polls showed fairly resilient support with white working class women, until the Clinton campaign stopped talking about economic change and asked people to vote for unity, temperament and experience and to continue on President Obama's progress. As we shall see, both the Democratic base and white working class voters are struggling economically and would demand change in their own ways.
Three Myths About Clinton's Defeat in Election 2016 DebunkedTom aka Rusty -> RGC... , November 17, 2016 at 09:46 AMPosted on November 14, 2016
By Lambert StretherThis post is not an explainer about why and how Clinton lost (and Trump won). I think we're going to be sorting that out for awhile. Rather, it's a simple debunking of common talking points by Clinton loyalists and Democrat Establishment operatives; the sort of talking point you might hear on Twitter, entirely shorn of caveats and context. For each of the three talking points, I'll present an especially egregious version of the myth, followed by a rebuttal.
In Michigan and Ohio HRC was known as "Mrs. NAFTA."Pinkybum -> Tom aka Rusty... , November 17, 2016 at 12:31 PMProbably not fair, but what about politics is fair?
Clinton's responses to the charges about NAFTA were incredibly weak. This is strange considering she must have known that topic was going to be raised - why was she so unprepared?ilsm -> Pinkybum... , November 17, 2016 at 01:05 PMThe dead did not vote enough in Pa. Oh, Wi, Fl, etcPinkybum -> ilsm... , November 17, 2016 at 03:21 PMShe presumed the DNC could fix all those states.
Did the dead also tell pollsters they were going to vote Democrat?Tom aka Rusty -> Pinkybum... , November 17, 2016 at 01:07 PMLots of Dem post mortems reported in various media.Peter K. : , November 17, 2016 at 09:34 AMInteresting for us sideline players.
http://theweek.com/articles/661872/why-hillary-clinton-lostilsm -> Peter K.... , November 17, 2016 at 01:06 PMWhy Hillary Clinton lost
by Ryan Cooper
Nov. 16, 2016
llary Clinton was an extraordinarily terrible candidate for the Democrats to run in 2016.
Donald Trump's approval rating is 38 percent. President Obama's just bumped up to 57 percent. No amount of furious dissembling from humiliated Clinton partisans will convince me that Obama - and very probably Bernie Sanders* - wouldn't have beaten Trump handily.
So what gives?
Let me start by noting that the overall polls were off, but not by that much. They predicted a Clinton victory by about about 3 points. And in the popular vote, that prediction was reasonably close. Clinton is ahead by a bit less than 1 percent nationally, with many votes still to count.
What tipped the election was about 100,000 votes spread across just three states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Here's where the polls did seriously botch things. Trump won these states by 1, 0.3, and 1.2 points respectively (assuming the close result in Michigan holds). The poll averages showed Clinton winning these states by roughly 6 points, 3 to 7 points, and 2 to 5 points respectively, depending on who you ask.
Some people did correctly point to this outcome being a possibility. Remarkably, most of them relied heavily on gut-check analysis. Zach Carter and Ryan Grim wrote way back in February that Trump could win by peeling off Rust Belt states, based on little more than intuitions about trade and general voting patterns. Michael Moore hypothesized something similar. Nathan J. Robinson wrote around the same time that Clinton would lose because she is a wooden, uninspiring campaigner who was almost uniquely vulnerable to Trump-style attacks on character and integrity.
Van Jones was perhaps most prescient of all. In June, he argued that Trump would not gaffe himself out of the election, because outrageous statements help him get attention on social media; that tut-tutting about his lack of realistic policy would not work, because voters neither know nor care about that; and that he could potentially win over Rust Belt whites attracted to Trump's anti-trade messaging, because "we're not paying attention to a big chunk of America that is hurting - that would accept any change, the bigger the better."
With the benefit of hindsight, I think we can add a couple more factors to the pile. First is the self-deception of the Clinton campaign and its media sycophants. She did not visit Wisconsin at all between April and the election, and largely abandoned Obama's working-class message from 2012 in favor of portraying Trump as a dangerous, woman-hating maniac.
They were enabled in this by pro-Clinton publications, which churned out endless slavish portrayals of Clinton as some kind of wizard of politics and policy, whose grasp of fine detail would surely deliver the electoral goods. In fact, it turned out that her vaunted algorithm-driven turnout machine was contacting tons of Trump voters. Paul Romer points to the problem of "mathiness" in economics, where complicated and intimidating theoretical symbolism is built up without establishing clear linkages to the real world. Lots of computers, theories, and datasets might be the most sophisticated way to attack voter turnout, or it might be a way to simply appear sophisticated while dismissing people whose ideas don't come packaged with a science-y veneer. (Something similar seems to have happened to the wonky election-simulator people.)
Then there is the Clintons' omnipresent aura of scandal and corruption, which is about 50 percent unfair double standard and 50 percent totally their fault. The political media has been obsessed with the Clintons for 20 years to a frankly psychotic degree, particularly given how much worse the stories about Trump were. On the other hand, the Clintons enable that coverage with a paranoid and secretive attitude, and an obvious hatred of the press. The Clinton Foundation coverage was unfair compared to the much worse Trump Foundation, but then again, there was some genuinely skeezy stuff in there. There's a good chance that FBI Director James Comey's vague letter about emails to congressional Republicans, which led to an extremely ill-timed media firestorm, tipped the election to Trump. But then again, she might have avoided the whole story by following the dang rules in the first place.
I always assumed that if Clinton were nominated for president, the race would be dominated by some weird quasi-scandal that dragged on for month after month. It's not fair, but it is simply the reality of the Clintons. At some point, one simply has to take that into account.
That brings me to a final point: Clinton's general political affect. She is not a great campaigner (by her own admission), a rather robotic speaker, and most of all, a dynasty politician who very obviously got the nomination because the party elite cleared the decks for her. Given how the party has evolved, her political history was filled with devastating indictments of her judgment and priorities. Even after getting a reasonably good party platform (after just barely beating back about the most unlikely primary challenger imaginable), she was a non-credible vehicle for it. Without Obama's mesmerizing charisma and political energy, her image was defined by things like taking millions of dollars for secret speeches to Wall Street banks and refusing to release the transcripts. She simply was not a good fit for the party, and a terrible avatar of the party in a country furious at self-dealing elite institutions of all kinds.
Hillary Clinton was a heavily compromised candidate and bad campaigner who grossly misjudged the political terrain, and thus bled just enough of the Obama coalition to let Trump sneak past. If we ever get to vote again, let's hope the party learns from this epic disaster.
And that, now, is the key question: Where do the Democrats go from here?
the split is 23%, 23% and 4% of registered voters. 50% sat it out.RGC : , November 17, 2016 at 09:42 AMReading Keynes - Part 3Fred C. Dobbs : , November 17, 2016 at 10:25 AM
L3 Impact of KeynesThis 1000 word article traces the impact of Keynesian theories on the 20th century.
The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has created awareness of the great gap between academic models and reality. IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard said that modern DSGE macroeconomic models currently used for policy decisions are based on assumptions which are profoundly at odds with what we know about consumers and firms. More than seven different schools of macroeconomic thought contend with each other, without coming to agreement on any fundamental issue. This bears a striking resemblance to the post-Depression era when Keynes set out to resolve the "deep divergences of opinion between fellow economists which have for the time being almost destroyed the practical influence of economic theory."
Likewise, today, the inability of mainstream economists to predict, understand, explain, or find remedies for the Global Financial Crisis, has deeply damaged the reputation of economists and economic theories. Recently, World Bank Chief Economist Paul Romer stated that for more than three decades, macroeconomics has gone backwards. Since modern macroeconomics bears a strong resemblance to pre-Keynesian theories, Keynesian theories have fresh relevance, as described below.
In the aftermath of the Great Depression, economic misery was a major factor which led to the Russian Revolution and the rise of Hitler in Germany. Conventional economic theory held that market forces would automatically and quickly correct the temporary disequilibrium of high unemployment and low production in Europe and USA. Keynes argued that high unemployment could persist, and government interventions in the form of active monetary and fiscal policy were required to correct the economic problems. Many have suggested that Keynes rescued Capitalism by providing governments with rationale to intervene on behalf of the workers, thereby preventing socialist or communist revolutions. There is no doubt that strong and powerful labor movements in Europe and USA derived strength from the economic misery of the masses, and also took inspiration from the pro-labor and anti-capitalist theories of Marx. While it is hard to be sure whether Keynes saved capitalism, we can be very sure that Keynes and Keynesian theories were extremely influential in shaping the economic landscapes of the 20th Century.
Keynes actually met Roosevelt (FDR) to try to persuade him of the necessity of an aggressive fiscal policy and of running budget deficits, in order to lift the US economy out of recession. He was only partially successful. FDR, like nearly all political leaders as well as economists of the time, was convinced of the necessity of balancing budgets: this is the same 'austerity' being touted today as the cure for economic problems. Leading economists like Lionel Robinson and Friedrich Hayek argued in favor of austerity, and said that Keynesian remedies were dangerously wrong. They held the view that the Great Depression had been caused by excessively easy monetary policies in the pre-Depression period, and Keynesian interventions in the form of further easy monetary and fiscal policies would only prolong the agony.
FDR was not quite convinced by Keynes, but was politically savvy enough to announce that he would not balance the budget on the backs of the American people. Accordingly, he did go against his personal convictions, as well as his campaign promises of balancing the budget, which he believed to be a sound and necessary economic policy. Keynes felt that the economic policies of FDR were timid and hesitant, and prolonged the recession un-necessarily. In light of contemporary experience of the tremendously aggressive expansionary monetary policy in the post-GFC era, we can see that bolder steps by FDR would not have caused the harms that he was afraid of. In fact, after the economy recovered somewhat, FDR went back to conventional wisdom and started reducing budget deficits in 1936. This created a mini-recession which has been labelled the "Roosevelt Recession of 1937". Duly chastened, FDR embraced Keynesian policies with greater conviction, and increased deficit spending right up to the second World War. It was the effectiveness of Keynesian policies that led even arch-enemy Friedman to state that "We are all Keynesians now," though he later recanted. Indeed, he master-minded the Monetarist counter-revolution in the 1970's which eventually led to a rejection of Keynesian insights, and a return to the pre-Keynesian ideas of austerity as a cure for recessions. Forgetting the hard-learned lessons of Keynes led to a recurrence of problems very similar to those faced by Keynes in the form of GFC 2007.
Following the GFC, there has been a resurgence of interest in Keynes and Keynesian Theories. In the "Return of Depression Economics", Krugman argued for the continuing relevance of Keynes, and stated that we could end the Great Recession immediately by implementing Keynesian policies. China implemented Keynesian policies, and used a fiscal stimulus of $586 billion spread over two years, to successfully combat the global recession created by the GFC. Unlike countries forced to implement austerity, which further wrecked their economies, the Chinese economy was able to perform well in the aftermath of the GFC. The Shanghai index had been falling sharply since the September 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, but the decline was halted when news of the planned stimulus leaked in late October. The day after the stimulus was officially announced, the Shanghai index immediately rose by 7.3%, followed by sustained growth. Speaking at the 2010 Summer Davos, Premier Wen Jiabao also credited the Keynesian fiscal stimulus for good performance of the Chinese economy over the two years following the GFC.
Meanwhile, even IMF acknowledged the failure of austerity, the anti-thesis of the Keynesian policy. Massive damage was caused to Greece, Ireland, Portugal and other economies which were forced to tighten budgets in response to the recession. In the see-saw battle between Keynesians and Monetarists, after three decades of darkness, the Keynesian star seems to be rising. Strange as it may seem, many fundamental insights of Keynes were never actually absorbed by conventional economists. Keynes himself said that he had the greatest difficulty in escaping the habits of thought created by an economics education. Mainstream economists never made this escape. As a result, Keynesian theories remain an undiscovered treasure offering deep insights into current economic conditions.
https://sites.google.com/site/21stcenturymacroeconomics/keynes/l3
The Glaring Contradiction at the Heart of Donald Trump'sRGC : , November 17, 2016 at 10:39 AM
Economic Policy http://nyti.ms/2eJFsw4 via @UpshotNYT
NYT - Neil Irwin - November 17Campaign promises are easy. Governing is hard.
It is a truism that Donald J. Trump and his team will soon learn. And a fascinating example has emerged since the election, courtesy of global currency markets. It is a study in the kind of complex trade-offs that Mr. Trump rarely grappled with during his campaign but will face many times a day in the Oval Office.
A centerpiece of Mr. Trump's campaign was the United States' trade deficits. He pledged to eliminate them and create a resurgence in American manufacturing.
He has also pledged tax cuts, infrastructure spending and deregulation. That set of policies has led markets to expect speedier economic growth and thus higher interest rates in coming years. That, in turn, is driving the value of the dollar higher on currency markets. Since Election Day, the dollar is up 2.6 percent against an index of six other major currencies. The value of the Mexican peso has fallen 10 percent against the dollar, a remarkable swing for the United States' third-largest trading partner.
You don't need to be an economist to see what that means: A pricier dollar makes it harder for American manufacturers to compete overseas; it gives an advantage to companies that locate operations elsewhere; and it will, all else being equal, tend to make the trade deficit higher rather than lower.
This is not to suggest that the shift in the currency so far is a major disaster for American manufacturers and other exporters (though those that ship their goods to Mexico will feel the brunt of it). There was a bigger rise in the dollar in 2014 and 2015 that damaged export sectors even more.
PhotoA board displaying the exchange rate for the Mexican peso and the dollar in a bank in Mexico City this week. Credit Henry Romero/Reuters
But let's imagine that Mr. Trump follows through on the policy mix he's hinted at so far: a combination of loose fiscal policy (think more spending on defense and infrastructure, and tax cuts) and tighter monetary policy (the Federal Reserve raising interest rates faster than
had seemed likely before the election). At that point, the dollar could move more decisively higher, creating a tension that the president and his advisers would have to resolve one way or the other.As a rule of thumb, said Joseph Gagnon, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a 10 percent rise in the dollar would be expected to increase the current account deficit (a broader concept than trade deficit, but closely related) by 1 to 1.5 percent of G.D.P. in the ensuing two to three years.
In that scenario, Mr. Trump's pledge to eliminate the $500 billion United States trade deficit would have just become $180 billion to $270 billion harder.
This is the kind of dilemma presidents face all the time. The Oval Office debate might go something like this: The Commerce Secretary complains, "Mr. President, this strong dollar is just killing our manufacturers; they can't compete with this kind of appreciation." The Treasury Secretary, who is in charge of the currency, responds, "It's a necessary evil, Mr. President; our economy is booming so much that global investors just can't get enough of United States assets."
When there are these kinds of disputes, the president has to decide. And when a president tries to find a solution that answers both concerns, there are always complex ripples. For example, "let's appoint Fed officials who will cut interest rates" might temporarily let you have both a booming domestic economy and a competitive export sector, but would mean an increase in inflation - which will make both the bond market and many retired Americans living on fixed incomes unhappy.
The tension between currency policy and trade policy is just one example. Mr. Trump's promises to repeal Obamacare while keeping some of its most popular features would be hard to carry out in practice. Virtually every issue in tax policy, diplomacy and regulatory policy features similar complex trade-offs.
None of this is to say that these tensions are unsolvable, or that Mr. Trump won't overcome his lack of a policy background to arrive at good solutions. But he will almost certainly find out soon that "Make America Great Again" is a slogan, not an answer.
Jo Michellilsm : , November 17, 2016 at 01:13 PMEconomics, Ideology and Trump
So the post-mortem begins. Much electronic ink has already been spilled and predictable fault lines have emerged. Debate rages in particular on the question of whether Trump's victory was driven by economic factors. Like Duncan Weldon, I think Torsten Bell gets it about right – economics is an essential part of the story even if the complete picture is more complex.
Neoliberalism is a word I usually try to avoid. It's often used by people on the left as an easy catch-all to avoid engaging with difficult issues. Broadly speaking, however, it provides a short-hand for the policy status quo over the last thirty years or so: free movement of goods, labour and capital, fiscal conservatism, rules-based monetary policy, deregulated finance and a preference for supply-side measures in the labour market.
Some will argue this consensus has nothing to with the rise of far-right populism. I disagree. Both economics and economic policy have brought us here.But to what extent has academic economics provided the basis for neoliberal policy? The question had been in my mind even before the Trump and Brexit votes. A few months back, Duncan Weldon posed the question, 'whatever happened to deficit bias?' In my view, the responses at the time missed the mark. More recently, Ann Pettifor and Simon Wren Lewis have been discussing the relationship between ideology, economics and fiscal austerity.
I have great respect for Simon – especially his efforts to combat the false media narratives around austerity. But I don't think he gets it right on economics and ideology. His argument is that in a standard model – a sticky-price DSGE system – fiscal policy should be used when nominal rates are at the zero lower bound. Post-2008 austerity policies are therefore at odds with the academic consensus.
This is correct in simple terms, but I think misses the bigger picture of what academic economics has been saying for the last 30 years. To explain, I need to recap some history.Fiscal policy as a macroeconomic management tool is associated with the ideas of Keynes. Against the academic consensus of his day, he argued that the economy could get stuck in periods of demand deficiency characterised by persistent involuntary unemployment. The monetarist counter-attack was led by Milton Friedman – who denied this possibility. In the long run, he argued, the economy has a 'natural' rate of unemployment to which it will gravitate automatically (the mechanism still remains to be explained). Any attempt to use activist fiscal or monetary policy to reduce unemployment below this natural rate will only lead to higher inflation. This led to the bitter disputes of the 1960s and 70s between Keynesians and Monetarists. The Monetarists emerged as victors – at least in the eyes of the orthodoxy – with the inflationary crises of the 1970s. This marks the beginning of the end for fiscal policy in the history of macroeconomics.
In Friedman's world, short-term macro policy could be justified in a deflationary situation as a way to help the economy back to its 'natural' state. But, for Friedman, macro policy means monetary policy. In line with the doctrine that the consumer always knows best, government spending was proscribed as distortionary and inefficient. For Friedman, the correct policy response to deflation is a temporary increase in the rate of growth of the money supply.
It's hard to view Milton Friedman's campaign against Keynes as disconnected from ideological influence. Friedman's role in the Mont Pelerin society is well documented. This group of economic liberals, led by Friedrich von Hayek, formed after World War II with the purpose of opposing the move towards collectivism of which Keynes was a leading figure. For a time at least, the group adopted the term 'neoliberal' to describe their political philosophy. This was an international group of economists whose express purpose was to influence politics and politicians – and they were successful.Hayek's thesis – which acquires a certain irony in light of Trump's ascent – was that collectivism inevitably leads to authoritarianism and fascism. Friedman's Chicago economics department formed one point in a triangular alliance with Lionel Robbins' LSE in London, and Hayek's fellow Austrians in Vienna. While in the 1930s, Friedman had expressed support for the New Deal, by the 1950s he had swung sharply in the direction of economic liberalism. As Brad Delong puts it:
by the early 1950s, his respect for even the possibility of government action was gone. His grudging approval of the New Deal was gone, too: Those elements that weren't positively destructive were ineffective, diverting attention from what Friedman now believed would have cured the Great Depression, a substantial expansion of the money supply. The New Deal, Friedman concluded, had been 'the wrong cure for the wrong disease.'While Friedman never produced a complete formal model to describe his macroeconomic vision, his successor at Chicago, Robert Lucas did – the New Classical model. (He also successfully destroyed the Keynesian structural econometric modelling tradition with his 'Lucas critique'.) Lucas' New Classical colleagues followed in his footsteps, constructing an even more extreme version of the model: the so-called Real Business Cycle model. This simply assumes a world in which all markets work perfectly all of the time, and the single infinitely lived representative agent, on average, correctly predicts the future.
This is the origin of the 'policy ineffectiveness hypothesis' – in such a world, government becomes completely impotent. Any attempt at deficit spending will be exactly matched by a corresponding reduction in private spending – the so-called Ricardian Equivalence hypothesis. Fiscal policy has no effect on output and employment. Even monetary policy becomes totally ineffective: if the central bank chooses to loosen monetary policy, the representative agent instantly and correctly predicts higher inflation and adjusts her behaviour accordingly.This vision, emerging from a leading centre of conservative thought, is still regarded by the academic economics community as a major scientific step forward. Simon describes it as `a progressive research programme'.
What does all this have to with the current status quo? The answer is that this model – with one single modification – is the 'standard model' which Simon and others point to when they argue that economics has no ideological bias. The modification is that prices in the goods market are slow to adjust to changes in demand. As a result, Milton Friedman's result that policy is effective in the short run is restored. The only substantial difference to Friedman's model is that the policy tool is the rate of interest, not the money supply. In a deflationary situation, the central bank should cut the nominal interest rate to raise demand and assist the automatic but sluggish transition back to the `natural' rate of unemployment.So what of Duncan's question: what happened to deficit bias? – this refers to the assertion in economics textbooks that there will always be a tendency for governments to allow deficits to increase. The answer is that it was written out of the textbooks decades ago – because it is simply taken as given that fiscal policy is not the correct tool.
To check this, I went to our university library and looked through a selection of macroeconomics textbooks. Mankiw's 'Macroeconomics' is probably the mostly widely used. I examined the 2007 edition – published just before the financial crisis. The chapter on 'Stabilisation Policy' dispenses with fiscal policy in half a page – a case study of Romer's critique of Keynes is presented under the heading 'Is the Stabilization of the Economy a Figment of the Data?' The rest of the chapter focuses on monetary policy: time inconsistency, interest rate rules and central bank independence. The only appearance of the liquidity trap and the zero lower bound is in another half-page box, but fiscal policy doesn't get a mention.
The post-crisis twelfth edition of Robert Gordon's textbook does include a chapter on fiscal policy – entitled `The Government Budget, the Government Debt and the Limitations of Fiscal Policy'. While Gordon acknowledges that fiscal policy is an option during strongly deflationary periods when interest rates are at the zero lower bound, most of the chapter is concerned with the crowding out of private investment, the dangers of government debt and the conditions under which governments become insolvent. Of the textbooks I examined, only Blanchard's contained anything resembling a balanced discussion of fiscal policy.So, in Duncan's words, governments are 'flying a two engined plane but choosing to use only one motor' not just because of media bias, an ill-informed public and misguided politicians – Simon's explanation – but because they are doing what the macro textbooks tell them to do.
The reason is that the standard New Keynesian model is not a Keynesian model at all – it is a monetarist model. Aside from the mathematical sophistication, it is all but indistinguishable from Milton Friedman's ideologically-driven description of the macroeconomy. In particular, Milton Friedman's prohibition of fiscal policy is retained with – in more recent years – a caveat about the zero-lower bound (Simon makes essentially the same point about fiscal policy here).
It's therefore odd that when Simon discusses the relationship between ideology and economics he chooses to draw a dividing line between those who use a sticky-price New Keynesian DSGE model and those who use a flexible-price New Classical version. The beliefs of the latter group are, Simon suggests, ideological, while those of the former group are based on ideology-free science. This strikes me as arbitrary. Simon's justification is that, despite the evidence, the RBC model denies the possibility of involuntary unemployment. But the sticky-price version – which denies any role for inequality, finance, money, banking, liquidity, default, long-run unemployment, the use of fiscal policy away from the ZLB, supply-side hysteresis effects and plenty else besides – is acceptable. He even goes so far as to say 'I have no problem seeing the RBC model as a flex-price NK model' – even the RBC model is non-ideological so long as the hierarchical framing is right.
Even Simon's key distinction – the New Keynesian model allows for involuntary unemployment – is open to question. Keynes' definition of involuntary unemployment is that there exist people willing and able to work at the going wage who are unable to find employment. On this definition the New Keynesian model falls short – in the face of a short-run demand shortage caused by sticky prices the representative agent simply selects a new optimal labour supply. Workers are never off their labour supply curve. In the Smets Wouters model – a very widely used New Keynesian DSGE model – the labour market is described as follows: 'household j chooses hours worked Lt(j)'. It is hard to reconcile involuntary unemployment with households choosing how much labour they supply.What of the position taken by the profession in the wake of 2008? Reinhart and Rogoff's contribution is by now infamous. Ann also draws attention to the 2010 letter signed by 20 top-ranking economists – including Rogoff – demanding austerity in the UK. Simon argues that Ann overlooks the fact that '58 equally notable economists signed a response arguing the 20 were wrong'.
It is difficult to agree that the signatories to the response letter, organised by Lord Skidelsky, are 'equally notable'. Many are heterodox economists – critics of standard macroeconomics. Those mainstream economists on the list hold positions at lower-ranking institutions than the 20. I know many of the 58 personally – I know none of the 20. Simon notes:
Of course those that signed the first letter, and in particular Ken Rogoff, turned out to be a more prominent voice in the subsequent debate, but that is because he supported what policymakers were doing. He was mostly useful rather than influential.
For Simon, causality is unidirectional: policy-makers cherry-pick academic economics to fit their purpose but economists have no influence on policy. This seems implausible. It is undoubtedly true that pro-austerity economists provided useful cover for small-state ideologues like George Osborne. But the parallels between policy and academia are too strong for the causality to be unidirectional.Osborne's small state ideology is a descendent of Thatcherism – the point when neoliberalism first replaced Keynesianism. Is it purely coincidence that the 1980s was also the high-point for extreme free market Chicago economics such as Real Business Cycle models?
The parallel between policy and academia continues with the emergence of the sticky-price New Keynesian version as the 'standard' model in the 90s alongside the shift to the third way of Blair and Clinton. Blairism represents a modified, less extreme, version of Thatcherism. The all-out assault on workers and the social safety net was replaced with 'workfare' and 'flexicurity'.A similar story can be told for international trade, as laid out in this excellent piece by Martin Sandbu. In the 1990s, just as the 'heyday of global trade integration was getting underway', economists were busy making the case that globalisation had no negative implications for employment or inequality in rich nations. To do this, they came up with the 'skill-biased technological change' (SBTC) hypothesis. This states that as technology advances and the potential for automation grows, the demand for high-skilled labour increases. This introduces the hitch that higher educational standards are required before the gains from automation can be felt by those outside the top income percentiles. This leads to a `race between education and technology' – a race which technology was winning, leading to weaker demand for middle and low-skill workers and rising 'skill premiums' for high skilled workers as a result.
Writing in the Financial Times shortly before the financial crisis, Jagdish Bagwati argued that those who looked to globalisation as an explanation for increasing inequality were misguided:
The culprit is not globalization but labour-saving technical change that puts pressure on the wages of the unskilled. Technical change prompts continual economies in the use of unskilled labour. Much empirical argumentation and evidence exists on this. (FT, January 4, 2007, p. 11)
As Krugman put it:
The hypothesis that technological change, by raising the demand for skill, has led to growing inequality is so widespread that at conferences economists often use the abbreviation SBTC – skill-biased technical change – without explanation, assuming that their listeners know what they are talking about (p. 132)
Over the course of his 2007 book, Krugman sets out on a voyage of discovery – 'That, more or less, is the story I believed when I began working on this book' (p. 6). He arrives at the astonishing conclusion – '[i]t sounds like economic heresy' (p. 7) – that politics can influence inequality:
[I]nstitutions, norms and the political environment matter a lot more for the distribution of income – and impersonal market forces matter less – than Economics 101 might lead you to believe (p. 8)The idea that rising pay at the top of the scale mainly reflect social and political change, strikes some people as too much at odds with Economics 101.
If a left-leaning Nobel prize-winning economist has trouble escaping from the confines of Economics 101, what hope for the less sophisticated mind?
As deindustrialisation rolled through the advanced economies, wiping out jobs and communities, economists continued to deny any role for globalisation. As Martin Sandbu argues,The blithe unconcern displayed by the economics profession and the political elites about whether trade was causing deindustrialisation, social exclusion and rising inequality has begun to seem Pollyannish at best, malicious at worst. Kevin O'Rourke, the Irish economist, and before him Lawrence Summers, former US Treasury Secretary, have called this "the Davos lie."
For mainstream macroeconomists, inequality was not a subject of any real interest. While the explanation for inequality lay in the microeconomics – the technical forms of production functions – and would be solved by increasing educational attainment, in macroeconomic terms, the use of a representative agent and an aggregate production function simply assumed the problem away. As Stiglitz puts it:
[I]f the distribution of income (say between labor and capital) matters, for example, for aggregate demand and therefore for employment and output, then using an aggregate Cobb-Douglas production function which, with competition, implies that the share of labor is fixed, is not going to be helpful. (p.596)
Robert Lucas summed up his position as follows: 'Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.' It is hard to view this statement as more strongly informed by science than ideology.
But while economists were busy assuming away inequality in their models, incomes continued to diverge in most advanced economies. It was only with the publication of Piketty's book that the economics profession belatedly began to turn its back on Lucas.The extent to which economic insecurity in the US and the UK is driven by globalisation versus policy is still under discussion – my answer would be that it is a combination of both – but the skill-biased technical change hypothesis looks to be a dead end – and a costly one at that.
Similar stories can be told about the role of household debt, finance, monetary theory and labour bargaining power and monopoly – why so much academic focus on 'structural reform' in the labour market but none on anti-trust policy? Heterodox economists were warning about the connections between finance, globalisation, current account imbalances, inequality, household debt and economic insecurity in the decades before the crisis. These warnings were dismissed as unscientific – in favour of a model which excluded all of these things by design.
Are economic factors – and economic policy – partly to blame for the Brexit and Trump votes? And are academic economists, at least in part, to blame for these polices? The answer to both questions is yes. To argue otherwise is to deny Keynes' dictum that 'the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood.'
This quote, 'mounted and framed, takes pride of place in the entrance hall of the Institute for Economic Affairs' – the think-tank founded, with Hayek's encouragement, by Anthony Fisher, as a way to promote and promulgate the ideas of the Mont Pelerin Society. The Institute was a success. Fisher was, in the words of Milton Friedman, 'the single most important person in the development of Thatcherism'.
The rest, it seems, is history.https://criticalfinance.org/2016/11/15/economics-ideology-and-trump/
A feat Goebbels could hardly pull off.Fred C. Dobbs -> ilsm... , November 17, 2016 at 02:22 PMObomber's new conference with Ms. Merkel. The peace prize winner who ordered 25000 bombing sorties in 2015 against places US is not warring against.
Per Obomber Assad caused all that suffering in Syria, despite US arming al Qaeda since 2010 to replace him with the kind of guys who rammed a bayonet through Qaddafi's rectum, and sending assassinated Qaddafi's weaponry through Benghazi at the time Clinton got her envoy killed there.
The greater threat to American democracy is the bizarre world of the US fighting for the Sunnis in the middle east. Also known as Obomber's Stalinist definitions of atrocities versus fictions about fascists.
Why would one of Qadaffi's ownim1dc : , November 17, 2016 at 01:20 PM
citizens do such a nasty deed on the
sadly misunderstood guy who brought down
Pan Am flight #103 over Lockerbie Scotland
killing 259 passenger & crew, previously
killing three people & injuring around
230 in La Belle discothčque in Berlin,
& why do you keep bringing this up?)Predictions for a Trump Presidency from a black Democrat woman activistim1dc -> im1dc... , November 17, 2016 at 01:22 PM"President-Elect Donald Trump Gets to Work Betraying His Backers"
'Millions of voters who thought they'd elected a populist hero will soon find out that men who live in golden penthouses are rarely heroes'
by Joy-Ann Reid...11.17.16...1:00 AM ET
"I should probably get out of the predictions business, having so misjudged the country before the recent election. But I will hazard two more. The first: Donald Trump will turn on his supporters. The second: The Democrats will turn on theirs, too.
Trump got a head start this week, floating the names of Iraq war supporters and promoters of a grand, global war with Islam like John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani for the job of secretary of state. Trump voters who claimed that Hillary Clinton would bring on World War III might be surprised by some of the views of Clinton and John Kerry's likely successor (and Giuliani is a vigorous neocon, too.)
Trump is now part of a global ring of ethno-nationalist leaders of far-right parties in thrall to Vladimir Putin's Russia. National security experts are shuddering at the demeanor of the people surrounding the next president who are busy mounting what Republican leakers are calling a "Stalinesque purge" of the insufficiently loyal. With the transition team in chaos, and experienced hands reluctant to join such an administration, who knows what kind of bizarre cabinet he'll wind up assembling.
Meanwhile, to the extent that he is doing something other than trying to figure out what a president does Trump-or rather the people around him who know how to take advantage of an opportunity-are preparing to stack his team with Wall Street and big-business friendly insiders and establishment cronies poised to raid the treasury on behalf of the one percent.
Working-class voters who thought they'd elected a populist hero will soon find out that men who live in golden penthouses are rarely populists, and even more rarely heroic. Trump, who in his own history as a developer preferred mob concrete and Chinese steel to the variety produced in the Rust Belt, cannot bring back the steel and manufacturing jobs lost in Lorain, Ohio or western Pennsylvania. No president can force shuttered mills to reopen, or companies who've left in search of cheaper labor to relocate to the United States (or those who have come back to choose expensive humans over cheaper robots.) Even if he manages to slap massive tariffs on Chinese-made goods, the only outcome will be much higher prices at Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, anyone still wondering why Paul Ryan quietly slipped on his MAGA cap during the election will soon understand. On the off chance Trump pulled off an improbable win, Ryan knew he would be on track to enact his life's dream: turning Medicare into a voucher program and forcing future of the most popular government program since Social Security into private insurance HMOs. According to Josh Marshall, who cites Ryan's own website, the "phasing out" of Medicare begins in March.
Trump's tax plan will sock it to single mothers, by ending the ability to file as head of household and thus raising taxes on unmarried filers. The tax hikes will be higher the more children you have. Anyone who doesn't itemize deductions will likely get a onetime check for a few hundred dollars, the way George W. Bush did his "middle class tax cut." Count that as bill money.
Trump's trade and immigration policies will deliver an economic shock to states like Texas where trade produces a substantial share of the jobs, and which depend on high oil prices. Trump's North Dakota pipeline (in which he is personally financially invested) will flood more oil onto an already glutted world market, further forcing down prices and putting both the Lone Star state in an unpleasant economic position.
But not to worry, Republicans have a fix, to ensure there is no voter backlash against them.
They are already preparing to reverse their opposition to earmarks, with three red state Senators (from Florida, Alabama and of course, Texas) pushing to revive the kind of spending that helps members go back to their districts with something to show for their time in Washington, and which long greased the skids of congress. You see, most in the GOP never really objected to government spending. They just objected to government spending that might make their constituents look more favorably on Barack Obama's tenure.
Also watch as the objections to raising the debt ceiling and to infrastructure spending-so vehement during the Obama years-vanish into thin air. This will be a big spending administration, with the full backing of congress. The small number of conservatives preparing to fight back are likely to cave, eventually, in the interests of party unity and maintaining total Republican control.
All the while, Trump fans can maintain their euphoria over taking America back from the multiculturalists, the politically correct, leftie Hollywood and Beyoncé, by purchasing clothing and jewelry from Ivanka Trump's retail line, which she'll dutifully model during television appearances, after which her staff will inform the media on where faithful followers can "shop the look." The Trump children, armed with security clearances and still in charge of the family business and the ephemeral "foundation" will be in a position to stuff the family coffers for four years, African dictator style, with the possible aid of information marked "secret" and thus unavailable to their competitors. And if you expect the fearsome House Republicans who hounded Hillary Clinton over her emails to lift a finger to investigate what already look to be spiraling conflicts of interest, you don't understand the Republican Party.
But it isn't just Trump who is poised to betray those who voted for him. Some Democrats and their allies are already rushing to get their Trump tattoos, knowing that the coming spending boom helps them too. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia excoriated Harry Reid, the out-going minority leader, who alone came out forthrightly to defend the black and brown women, men, children, businesses and even churches being brutalized by gleeful Trump supporters from the GOP's white supremacist wing, in cities around the country. Reid, whose Nevada Democratic Party operation was actually successful in the 2016 elections, including getting a Latina elected to his seat, has bravely called out the white nationalists and anti-Semites of the alt-right and stood against the normalization of people like soon-to-be Trump senior counselor Stephen Bannon. But Reid is a lonely voice standing athwart anti-history yelling, "stop," while his party and the mainstream media fall into a swoon of presidential succession pageantry.
Even Bernie Sanders couldn't rush fast enough to get on the Trump side of the line, declaring himself a member of the white working class (his and his wife's three homes and high six-figure income aside) and cautioning Democrats-who belong to a party of which he is still not a member-to start focusing on these voters too. Sanders ran a campaign that echoed Trump's in many ways; appealing to a majority white, populist audience that hated Hillary Clinton more than it disdained Republicans. A majority of Black Americans were unimpressed, which is why he didn't become the nominee, and they should be unsurprised that he is dropping them faster than he and his supporters wrote off "the South" as insignificant during the primary campaign.
Bernie is not alone. Think pieces are already being written admonishing Dems to throw black and brown, LGBT, Muslim and Hispanic voters and progressive women under the bus in favor of the never-ending chase for the Pabst Blue Ribbon vote. Democrats continue to practice "identity politics" at their peril, they say; demanding that issues around rape culture, Black Lives Matter and merciful immigration policy be scotched in favor of bucking up men, dialing back blunt talk on race, policing and DREAMers, and emphasizing things like border security. In other words, Democrats must learn to talk more like Republicans and marginalized groups must learn to be quiet. The party has been here before, and ironically, that kind of thinking is what produced Bill Clinton, whose surname, and wife, the very people hawking this prescription loathe.
The message to African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, LGBT people (well, mostly Trans folks, since Trump has declared his movement can live with "the gays") and women, who stand in the crosshairs of the coming "retail authoritarian" presidency, is that you're on your own. Your party will not come to your aid. They'll be too busy trying to ride the Trump train, or to least avoid being tied to the tracks and run over by it in the next election.
There are small green shoots of hope. The coming battle for DNC chair, which could come down to two black candidates: Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison and South Carolina Democratic Party chair Jamie Harrison, is a proxy for whether the party will push a message of Sandersian working class populism or press forward on the ongoing fight for racial justice, voting rights and the rights of the poor. Perhaps one of these men can help the party find a way to do both.
And despite her immediate statement of conciliation to Trump, one can only hope Elizabeth Warren will hold strong on issues concerning Wall Street, once Republicans begin the process of dismantling restrictions on bankers' worst practices, restoring the robber baron era in lower Manhattan and on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where the "tea party movement" was born amid furious presumptions that Obama would dare to help struggling homeowners instead of their mortgage note holders. We'll just have to wait and see.
In the end, the lessons of American history, from Reconstruction to the Fusion movement of the late 19th century; that an openness to the aspirations of racial, ethnic and religious minorities will always produce a fierce backlash among the country's majority population and cost the party dearly, have proven thrice true in the modern era-in the bloody political aftermath of Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton and now Barack Obama. All three marched the country forward on race, culture and economics, only to cede federal and state governmental power for years to the Republican right, which quickly proceeded, each time, to reward the rich and the powerful on the backs of their working class supporters who just wanted to feel like winners again.
In a sense, who can blame the Democrats for running away? But run they will. Count on it."
I very much like the idea of bringing back "earmarks", for the record.Fred C. Dobbs -> im1dc... , November 17, 2016 at 02:10 PMI did not know that Paul Ryan's website is proclaiming the end of Medicare as we know it to begin March 2017. That is ominous indeed.
Trump pledges to earmark $20B for school choiceFred C. Dobbs : , November 17, 2016 at 01:23 PM
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/295034-trump-to-earmark-20b-for-school-choice
The Hill = Sep 8(Personally, I'll take a block
grant over an earmark any day.)(Premium members only.)Fred C. Dobbs : , November 17, 2016 at 01:23 PMMcDonald's gets fancy, says table
service coming to US locationsNEW YORK - McDonald's says it plans to offer table service across its U.S. stores to make the ordering process less stressful, but did not say when the overhaul will be complete.
The world's biggest burger chain says about 500 of its more than 14,000 domestic stores have been testing table service and ordering kiosks for people who do not want to wait for the cashier. People in those stores order at the counter or kiosks, then sit and wait for an employee to bring them their food.
Early next year, McDonald's says it will expand the offering in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C. ...
(Premium members only.)im1dc : , November 17, 2016 at 01:44 PMMcDonald's gets fancy, says table
service coming to US locationsNEW YORK - McDonald's says it plans to offer table service across its U.S. stores to make the ordering process less stressful, but did not say when the overhaul will be complete.
The world's biggest burger chain says about 500 of its more than 14,000 domestic stores have been testing table service and ordering kiosks for people who do not want to wait for the cashier. People in those stores order at the counter or kiosks, then sit and wait for an employee to bring them their food.
Early next year, McDonald's says it will expand the offering in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C. ...
This goes together with RGC's post above whether it is time to "Break up the Democratic Party"im1dc : , November 17, 2016 at 01:51 PMThis article suggests changing its message as well as its messengers would work better to seat Democrats in Elected Office
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/17/democrats-dig-deep-after-being-trump-d.html
"Democrats Dig Deep After Being Trump'd"
'Democrats on the Hill began soul searching this week-but the process appears to be longer for some than others'
by Matt Laslo...11.17.16...1:00 AM ET
"The Democratic Party is at a crossroads, but everyone on Capitol Hill seems to have a different roadmap.
Democrats, still in shock over Hillary Clinton's surprise loss to president-elect Donald Trump, are faced with a stark new reality: they are not only the minority party in all corners of Capitol Hill and across the nation-but there are cracks in places where their foundation was thought to be very strong.
The party is debating how it got here and whether it's time to tack left, in the Bernie Sanders' vein of populism, or to go back to the middle, which is how they won in the nineties and regained control of the House in 2006.
The change didn't come overnight. The party has been devastated in the past three election cycles, losing more than 900 state legislative seats and 11 governorships since President Barack Obama took office.
But it was Clinton's string of losses in the Rust Belt-Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio-that caused the soul searching in the party.
"So you can't conclude anything else but that our message is wrong. Our values aren't wrong, but our message is wrong," Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.) told The Daily Beast. "The one thing we must commit to is that whatever our message is going forward must be different than what we had in the past because that one has failed."...
re Paul Ryan's fast track changes to Medicareim1dc -> im1dc... , November 17, 2016 at 01:56 PMRep Price, Chairman of House Budget Committee is on it
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/tom-price-reveals-republicans-eyeing-medicare-overhaul-in-2017
"Rep. Tom Price Reveals Republicans Eyeing Medicare Overhaul In 2017"
By Lauren Fox...November 17, 2016...12:13 PM EDT
"Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), the chairman of the budget committee, told reporters on Thursday that Republicans are eyeing major changes to Medicare in 2017.
Price, who is being floated as a possible Health and Human Services Secretary in the next administration, said that he expects Republican in the House to move on Medicare reforms "six to eight months" into the Trump administration.
Privatization of Medicare has been a central feature of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan's budget proposal for years, and the House GOP has voted in favor of it multiple times. Ryan himself said last week that Medicare would be on the table in the new Congress, signaling it could be taken up early in the new year. Price's comments suggest privatization won't be part of the first round of legislative initiatives rolled out by the Trump administration and GOP-controlled Congress.
Price also noted that Republicans are eyeing using a tactic known as budget reconciliation to make the change. That process allows Republicans to pass bills with a simple majority in the U.S. Senate.
When asked by TPM about timing for changes to Medicare, Price said "I think that is probably in the second phase of reconciliation, which would have to be in the FY 18 budget resolution in the first 6-8 months."
Republicans plan to tackle the Affordable Care Act in the first budget reconciliation process, which could take place as early as January. Tackling Medicare reform and Obamacare repeal at the same time could prove too high a risk for Republicans who have yet to reveal a clear plan to replace Obamacare with.
During his weekly press conference House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) remained vague about the timing for such reforms, saying only that those discussions are still underway."
Why should the Democrat Party change now that the Republicans have begun over reaching by believing they have a mandate from the voters?ilsm -> im1dc... , November 17, 2016 at 03:51 PMChange Medicare? Was that on the ballot?
Seriously was that what the Electorate wants from Donald Trump and the Republicans?
Am I alone in seeing a huge opportunity for Democrats politically here?
I saw the idea of a Trump presidency as the best thing that could happen to progressive since Hoover.im1dc -> ilsm... , November 17, 2016 at 05:24 PMwe still need an electable candidate to emerge from the ferment.Pinkybum -> im1dc... , November 17, 2016 at 05:02 PMPrivatizing Medicare will be a disaster it can only end in the service being worse. I'm sure they have plans to go after Social Security too. Getting rid of Obamacare won't hurt the white middle class too bad but even there too most people will know someone with a preexisting condition who can't get medical insurance. Good luck with all that Republicans!!anne : , -1https://investor.vanguard.com/mutual-funds/list#/mutual-funds/asset-class/month-end-returnsanne : , November 17, 2016 at 02:53 PMNovember 17, 2016
The 3 month Treasury interest rate is at 0.43%, the 2 year Treasury rate is 1.03%, the 5 year rate is 1.72%, while the 10 year is 2.29%.
The Vanguard Aa rated short-term investment grade bond fund, with a maturity of 3.2 years and a duration of 2.6 years, has a yield of 1.63%. The Vanguard Aa rated intermediate-term investment grade bond fund, with a maturity of 6.4 years and a duration of 5.5 years, is yielding 2.37%. The Vanguard Aa rated long-term investment grade bond fund, with a maturity of 23.0 years and a duration of 13.6 years, is yielding 3.75%. *
The Vanguard Ba rated high yield corporate bond fund, with a maturity of 5.6 years and a duration of 4.4 years, is yielding 5.40%.
The Vanguard unrated convertible corporate bond fund, with an indefinite maturity and a duration of 4.1 years, is yielding 2.04%.
The Vanguard A rated high yield tax exempt bond fund, with a maturity of 6.8 years and a duration of 6.4 years, is yielding 2.66%.
The Vanguard Aa rated intermediate-term tax exempt bond fund, with a maturity of 5.4 years and a duration of 4.8 years, is yielding 1.59%.
The Vanguard Government National Mortgage Association bond fund, with a maturity of 5.7 years and a duration of 3.4 years, is yielding 2.05%.
The Vanguard inflation protected Treasury bond fund, with a maturity of 8.8 years and a duration of 8.3 years, is yielding - 0.21%.
* Vanguard yields are after cost. Federal Funds rates are no more than 0.50%.
http://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe/anne : , November 17, 2016 at 02:53 PMTen Year Cyclically Adjusted Price Earnings Ratio, 1881-2016
(Standard and Poors Composite Stock Index)
November 17, 2016 PE Ratio ( 27.08)
Annual Mean ( 16.70)
Annual Median ( 16.05)-- Robert Shiller
http://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-dividend-yield/im1dc : , November 17, 2016 at 03:26 PMDividend Yield, 1881-2016
(Standard and Poors Composite Stock Index)
November 17, 2016 Div Yield ( 2.06)
Annual Mean ( 4.38)
Annual Median ( 4.33)-- Robert Shiller
"Consumer prices show big increase on rising gasoline costs and rents"im1dc : , November 17, 2016 at 03:36 PMLooks like a go for the FedRes to raise rates in December
"Consumer prices show big increase on rising gasoline costs and rents"
Reuters...November 17, 2016...5:27 PM
'Consumer prices show big increase'
"Consumer prices recorded their biggest increase in six months in October on rising gasoline costs and rents, suggesting a pickup in inflation that potentially clears the way for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in December.
Prospects for a rate hike next month also got a boost from other data on Thursday showing first-time applications for unemployment benefits tumbling to a 43-year low last week and housing starts surging to a nine-year high in October.
The reports painted an upbeat picture of the economy early in the fourth quarter and came as Fed Chair Janet L. Yellen told lawmakers that the U.S. central bank could lift borrowing costs "relatively soon."
The Labor Department said its consumer price index increased 0.4 percent last month after rising 0.3 percent in September. In the 12 months through October, the CPI advanced 1.6 percent, the biggest year-on-year increase since October 2014. The CPI increased 1.5 percent in the year to September.
Underlying inflation continued to slow last month as health-care costs moderated after recent hefty gains. But with rents pushing higher, that trend is unlikely to be sustained.
The so-called core CPI, which strips out food and energy costs, climbed 0.1 percent last month after a similar gain in September. That slowed the year-on-year increase in the core CPI to 2.1 percent from a 2.2 percent rise in September.
The Fed has a 2 percent inflation target and tracks an inflation measure that is now at 1.7 percent.
In another report, the Labor Department said initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped 19,000 to a seasonally adjusted 235,000 for the week ended Nov. 12, the lowest level since November 1973.
Claims have now been below 300,000, a threshold associated with a healthy labor market, for 89 straight weeks. That is the longest run since 1970, when the labor market was much smaller.
With the labor market firming and rents rising, housing is getting a lift. In a third report, the Commerce Department said housing starts jumped 25.5 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual pace of 1.32 million units last month, the highest level since August 2007."
Reuters
This is what Chairman Yellen told Congress todayilsm -> im1dc... , November 17, 2016 at 03:52 PM"Federal Reserve Chair Throws Cold Water On Trump's Economic Plan"
by Chris Arnold...November 17, 2016...5:25 PM ET
"President-elect Donald Trump has pledged a $1 trillion infrastructure spending program to help jump-start an economy that he said during the campaign was in terrible shape.
Speaking on Capitol Hill Thursday, Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen warned lawmakers that as they consider such spending, they should keep an eye on the national debt. Yellen also said that while the economy needed a big boost with fiscal stimulus after the financial crisis, that's not the case now.
"The economy is operating relatively close to full employment at this point," she said, "so in contrast to where the economy was after the financial crisis when a large demand boost was needed to lower unemployment, we're no longer in that state."
Yellen cautioned lawmakers that if they spend a lot on infrastructure and run up the debt, and then down the road the economy gets into trouble, "there is not a lot of fiscal space should a shock to the economy occur, an adverse shock, that should require fiscal stimulus."
In other words, lawmakers should consider keeping their powder dry so they have more options whenever the next economic downturn comes along.
Trump was harshly critical of Yellen during his campaign. But testifying before the Joint Economic Committee, Yellen said she is not going to quit just because Trump won the election. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., asked Yellen, "Can you envision any circumstances where you would not serve out your term as chair of the Federal Reserve?" "No, I cannot," answered Yellen, "It is fully my intention to serve out that term." Yellen's appointment goes through January 2018.
Another target of Trump's during the campaign came up at the hearing: the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Rep. Pat Tiberi, R-Ohio, cited Trump's criticism that the Dodd-Frank banking rules were stifling lending and stunting the economy. But Yellen gave her support to Dodd-Frank, saying:
"We lived through a devastating financial crisis, and a high priority for all Americans should be that we want to see put in place safeguards through supervision and regulation that result in a safer and sounder financial system, and I think we have been doing that and our financial system as a consequence is safer and sounder and many of the appropriate reforms are embodied in Dodd-Frank."
Yellen added, "We wouldn't want to go back to the mortgage lending standards that led to the financial crisis."
She also said she thought banks were actually willing to lend to small businesses, but that sales haven't been growing sufficiently fast to justify borrowing, suggesting the demand for loans was the real problem.
As far as the ever-present question about when the Fed will raise interest rates, Yellen signaled that she didn't see any reason to alter the Fed's prior guidance now that Trump has been elected as the next president."
What Humpty Dumpty : ......im1dc : , November 17, 2016 at 04:45 PM"What do the Amish lobby, gay wedding vans and the ban of the national anthem have in common?"im1dc -> im1dc... , November 17, 2016 at 04:46 PM"Facebook fake-news writer: 'I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me'"
by Caitlin Dewey...The Washington Post
"What do the Amish lobby, gay wedding vans and the ban of the national anthem have in common? For starters, they're all make-believe - and invented by the same man.
Paul Horner, the 38-year-old impresario of a Facebook fake-news empire, has made his living off viral news hoaxes for several years. He has twice convinced the Internet that he's British graffiti artist Banksy; he also published the very viral, very fake news of a Yelp vs. "South Park" lawsuit last year.
But in recent months, Horner has found the fake-news ecosystem growing more crowded, more political and vastly more influential: In March, Donald Trump's son Eric and his then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, even tweeted links to one of Horner's faux-articles. His stories have also appeared as news on Google.
In light of concerns that stories like Horner's may have affected the presidential election, and in the wake of announcements that both Google and Facebook would take action against deceptive outlets, The Washington Post called Horner to discuss his perspective on fake news.
Q: You've been writing fake news for a while now - you're kind of like the OG Facebook news hoaxer. Well, I'd call it hoaxing or fake news. You'd call it parody or satire. How is that scene different now than it was three or five years ago? Why did something like your story about Obama invalidating the election results (almost 250,000 Facebook shares, as of this writing) go so viral?
A: Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore - I mean, that's how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn't care because they'd already accepted it. It's real scary. I've never seen anything like it.
Q: You mentioned Trump, and you've probably heard the argument, or the concern, that fake news somehow helped him get elected. What do you make of that?
A: My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don't fact-check anything - they'll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.
Q: Why? I mean - why would you even write that?
A: Just 'cause his supporters were under the belief that people were getting paid to protest at their rallies, and that's just insane. I've gone to Trump protests - trust me, no one needs to get paid to protest Trump. I just wanted to make fun of that insane belief, but it took off. They actually believed it.
I thought they'd fact-check it, and it'd make them look worse. I mean that's how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it's false, then they look like idiots. But Trump supporters - they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now he's in the White House. Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels (bad).
Q: You think you personally helped elect Trump?
A: I don't know. I don't know if I did or not. I don't know. I don't know.
Q: I guess I'm curious, if you believed you might be having an unfair impact on the election - especially if that impact went against your own political beliefs - why didn't you stop? Why keep writing?
A: I didn't think it was possible for him to get elected president. I thought I was messing with the campaign, maybe I wasn't messing them up as much as I wanted - but I never thought he'd actually get elected. I didn't even think about it. In hindsight, everyone should've seen this coming - everyone assumed Hillary (Clinton) would just get in. But she didn't, and Trump is president.
Q: Speaking of Clinton - did you target fake news at her supporters? Or Gary Johnson's, for that matter? (Horner's Facebook picture shows him at a rally for Johnson.)
A: No. I hate Trump.
Q: Is that it? You posted on Facebook a couple weeks ago that you had a lot of ideas for satirizing Clinton and other figures, but that "no joke in doing this for six years, the people who clicked ads the most, like it's the cure for cancer, is right-wing Republicans." That makes it sound like you've found targeting conservatives is more profitable.
A: Yeah, it is. They don't fact-check.
Q: But a Trump presidency is good for you from a business perspective, right?
A: It's great for anybody who does anything with satire - there's nothing you can't write about now that people won't believe. I can write the craziest thing about Trump, and people will believe it. I wrote a lot of crazy anti-Muslim stuff - like about Trump wanting to put badges on Muslims, or not allowing them in the airport, or making them stand in their own line - and people went along with it!
Q: Facebook and Google recently announced that they'd no longer let fake-news sites use their advertising platforms. I know you basically make your living from those services. How worried are you about this?
A: This whole Google AdSense thing is pretty scary. And all this Facebook stuff. I make most of my money from AdSense - like, you wouldn't believe how much money I make from it. Right now I make like $10,000 a month from AdSense.
I know ways of getting hooked up under different names and sites. So probably if they cracked down, I would try different things. I have at least 10 sites right now. If they crack down on a couple, I'll just use others. They could shut down advertising on all my sites, and I think I'd be OK. Plus, Facebook and AdSense make a lot of money from (advertising on fake news sites) for them to just get rid of it. They'd lose a lot of money.
But if it did really go away, that would suck. I don't know what I would do.
Q: Thinking about this less selfishly, though - it might be good if Facebook and Google took action, right? Because the effects you're describing are pretty scary.
A: Yeah, I mean - a lot of the sites people are talking about, they're just total BS sites. There's no creativity or purpose behind them. I'm glad they're getting rid of them. I don't like getting lumped in with Huzlers. I like getting lumped in with the Onion. The stuff I do - I spend more time on it. There's purpose and meaning behind it. I don't just write fake news just to write it.
So, yeah, I see a lot of the sites they're listing, and I'm like - good. There are so many horrible sites out there. I'm glad they're getting rid of those sites.
I just hope they don't get rid of mine, too."
The takeaway: "Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore"
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Nov 18, 2016 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
chunder maker in that statement eh? Hope dashed! jo6pac November 17, 2016 at 3:13 pmcocomaan November 17, 2016 at 7:44 pmLambert you were on to something when you mention his twitter account.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/17/the-skeletons-in-keith-ellisons-display-case/
I know my Muslim friends would never want to hurt anyone but this guy is as crazy as hillabillie.
uncle tungsten November 18, 2016 at 7:25 amSupport for Syria and Libya interventions? Gross. No thanks.
Who else do we got? Wait this is it? WHAT?!!
Ellison is a dud, Bernie tweets support for Schumer "there's nobody I know better prepared and more capable of leading our caucus than Chuck Schumer"!
Well there's a good chunder maker in that statement eh? Hope dashed!There are no doubt many who are better informed, more progressive and principled, more remote from Wall Street and oligarchic capture than Chuck Schumer and Ellison. So there you have it – this is reform in the Democrats after a crushing defeat.
Vale democrats, and now the journey becomes arduous with these voices to smother hope. A new party is urgently needed (I know how difficult that is) and these voices of the old machine need to be ignored for the sake of sanity.
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bruce wilder 11.16.16 at 10:07 pm 30
At the center of Great Depression politics was a political struggle over the distribution of income, a struggle that was only decisively resolved during the War, by the Great Compression. It was at center of farm policy where policymakers struggled to find ways to support farm incomes. It was at the center of industrial relations politics, where rapidly expanding unions were seeking higher industrial wages. It was at the center of banking policy, where predatory financial practices were under attack. It was at the center of efforts to regulate electric utility rates and establish public power projects. And, everywhere, the clear subtext was a struggle between rich and poor, the economic royalists as FDR once called them and everyone else.
FDR, an unmistakeable patrician in manner and pedigree, was leading a not-quite-revolutionary politics, which was nevertheless hostile to and suspicious of business elites, as a source of economic pathology. The New Deal did not seek to overthrow the plutocracy, but it did seek to side-step and disable their dominance.
It seems to me that while neoliberalism on the right was much the same old same old, the neoliberal turn on the left was marked by a measured abandonment of this struggle over the distribution of income between the classes. In the U.S., the Democrats gradually abandoned their populist commitments. In Europe, the labour and socialist parties gradually abandoned class struggle.
In retrospect, though the New Deal did use direct employment as a means of relief to good effect economically and politically, it never undertook anything like a Keynesian stimulus on a Keynesian scale - at least until the War.
Where the New Deal witnessed the institution of an elaborate system of financial repression, accomplished in large part by imposing on the financial sector an explicitly mandated structure, with types of firms and effective limits on firm size and scope, a series of regulatory reforms and financial crises beginning with Carter and Reagan served to wipe this structure away.
When Obama came in, in 2008 amid the unfolding GFC, one of the most remarkable features of his economic team was the extent to which it conceded control of policy entirely to the leading money center banks. Geithner and Bernanke continued in power with Geithner moving from the New York Federal Reserve (where he served as I recall under a Chair from Goldman Sachs) to Treasury in the Obama Administration, but Geithner's Treasury was staffed from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Citibank. The crisis served to concentrate banking assets in the hands of the top five banks, but it seemed also to transfer political power entirely into their hands as well. Simon Johnson called it a coup.
I don't know what considerations guided Obama in choosing the size of the stimulus or its composition (as spending and tax cuts). Larry Summers was identified at the time as a voice of caution, not "gambling", but not much is known about his detailed reasoning in severely trimming Christina Romer's entirely conventional calculations. (One consideration might well have been worldwide resource shortages, which had made themselves felt in 2007-8 as an inflationary spike in commodity prices.) I do not see a case for connecting stimulus size policy to the health care reform. At the time the stimulus was proposed, the Administration had also been considering whether various big banks and other financial institutions should be nationalized, forced to insolvency or otherwise restructured as part of a regulatory reform.
Here's the thing: the globalization and financialization of the economy from roughly 1980 drove both increasingly extreme distribution of income and de-industrialization. Accelerating the financialization of the economy from 1999 on made New York and Washington rich, but the same economic policies and process were devastating the Rust Belt as de-industrialization. They were two aspects of the same complex of economic trends and policies. The rise of China as a manufacturing center was, in critical respects, a financial operation within the context of globalized trade that made investment in new manufacturing plant in China, as part of globalized supply chains and global brand management, (arguably artificially) low-risk and high-profit, while reinvestment in manufacturing in the American mid-west became unattractive, except as a game of extracting tax subsidies or ripping off workers.
It was characteristic of neoliberalism that the policy, policy intention and policy consequences were hidden behind a rhetoric of markets and technological inevitability. Matt Stoller has identified this as the statecraft of neoliberalism: the elimination of political agency and responsibility for economic performance and outcomes. Globalization and financialization were just "forces" that just happened, in a meteorological economics.
It is conceding too many good intentions to the Obama Administration to tie an inadequate stimulus to a Rube Goldberg health care reform as the origin story for the final debacle of Democratic neoliberal politics. There was a delicate balancing act going on, but they were not balancing the recovery of the economy in general so much as they were balancing the recovery from insolvency of a highly inefficient and arguably predatory financial sector, which was also not incidentally financing the institutional core of the Democratic Party and staffing many key positions in the Administration and in the regulatory apparatus.
This was not your grandfather's Democratic Party and it was a Democratic Party that could aid the working class and the Rust Belt only within fairly severe and sometimes sharply conflicting constraints.
No one in the Democratic Party had much institutional incentive to connect the dots, and draw attention to the acute conflicts over the distribution of income and wealth involved in financialization of the economy (including financialization as a driver of health care costs). And, that makes the political problem that much harder, because there are no resources for rhetorical and informational clarity or coherence.
bruce wilder 11.16.16 at 10:33 pm ( 31 )
The short version of my thinking on the Obama stimulus is this: Keynesian stimulus spending is a free lunch; it doesn't really matter what you spend money on up to a very generous point, so it seems ready-made for legislative log-rolling. If Obama could not get a very big stimulus indeed thru a Democratic Congress long out of power, Obama wasn't really trying. And, well-chosen spending on pork barrel projects is popular and gets Congressional critters re-elected. So, again, if the stimulus is small and the Democratic Congress doesn't get re-elected, Obama isn't really trying.Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism, because it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference.
likbez 11.18.16 at 4:48 pm 121
bruce wilder 11.16.16 at 10:07 pm 30Great comment. Simply great. Hat tip to the author !
Notable quotes:
"… The New Deal did not seek to overthrow the plutocracy, but it did seek to side-step and disable their dominance. …"
"… It seems to me that while neoliberalism on the right was much the same old same old, the neoliberal turn on the left was marked by a measured abandonment of this struggle over the distribution of income between the classes. In the U.S., the Democrats gradually abandoned their populist commitments. In Europe, the labour and socialist parties gradually abandoned class struggle. …"
"… When Obama came in, in 2008 amid the unfolding GFC, one of the most remarkable features of his economic team was the extent to which it conceded control of policy entirely to the leading money center banks. Geithner and Bernanke continued in power with Geithner moving from the New York Federal Reserve (where he served as I recall under a Chair from Goldman Sachs) to Treasury in the Obama Administration, but Geithner's Treasury was staffed from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Citibank. The crisis served to concentrate banking assets in the hands of the top five banks, but it seemed also to transfer political power entirely into their hands as well. Simon Johnson called it a coup. … "
"… Here's the thing: the globalization and financialization of the economy from roughly 1980 drove both increasingly extreme distribution of income and de-industrialization. …"
"… It was characteristic of neoliberalism that the policy, policy intention and policy consequences were hidden behind a rhetoric of markets and technological inevitability. Matt Stoller has identified this as the statecraft of neoliberalism: the elimination of political agency and responsibility for economic performance and outcomes. Globalization and financialization were just "forces" that just happened, in a meteorological economics. …"
"… This was not your grandfather's Democratic Party and it was a Democratic Party that could aid the working class and the Rust Belt only within fairly severe and sometimes sharply conflicting constraints. …"
"… No one in the Democratic Party had much institutional incentive to connect the dots, and draw attention to the acute conflicts over the distribution of income and wealth involved in financialization of the economy (including financialization as a driver of health care costs). And, that makes the political problem that much harder, because there are no resources for rhetorical and informational clarity or coherence. …"
"… If Obama could not get a very big stimulus indeed thru a Democratic Congress long out of power, Obama wasn't really trying. And, well-chosen spending on pork barrel projects is popular and gets Congressional critters re-elected. So, again, if the stimulus is small and the Democratic Congress doesn't get re-elected, Obama isn't really trying. …"
"… Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism, because it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference. …"
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mclaren 11.16.16 at 9:52 am 7
Eric places the blame for this loss squarely on economics, which, it seems to me, gets the analysis exactly right. And the statistics back up his analysis, I believe.It's disturbing and saddening to watch other left-wing websites ignore those statistics and charge off the cliff into the abyss, screaming that this election was all about racism/misogyny/homophobia/[fill in the blank with identity politics demonology of your choice]. First, the "it's all racism" analysis conveniently lets the current Democratic leadership off the hook. They didn't do anything wrong, it was those "deplorables" (half the country!) who are to blame. Second, the identity politics blame-shifting completely overlooks and short-circuits any real action to fix the economy by Democratic policymakers or Democratic politicians or the Democratic party leadership. That's particularly convenient for the Democratic leadership because these top-four-percenter professionals "promise anything and change nothing" while jetting between Davos and Martha's Vineyard, ignoring the peons who don't make $100,000 or more a year because the peons all live in flyover country.
"Trump supporters were on average affluent, but they are always Republican and aren't numerous enough to deliver the presidency (538 has changed their view in the wake of the election result). Some point out that looking at support by income doesn't show much distinctive support for Trump among the "poor", but that's beside the point too, as it submerges a regional phenomenon in a national average, just as exit polls do. (..)
"When commentators like Michael Moore and Thomas Frank pointed out that there was possibility for Trump in the Rust Belt they were mostly ignored or, even more improbably, accused of being apologists for racism and misogyny. But that is what Trump did, and he won. Moreover, he won with an amateurish campaign against a well-funded and politically sophisticated opponent simply because he planted his flag where others wouldn't."Because of the obsession with exit polls, post-election analysis has not come to grips with the regional nature of the Trump phenomenon. Exit polls divide the general electorate based on individual attributes: race, gender, income, education, and so on, making regional distinctions invisible. Moreover, America doesn't decide the presidential election that way. It decides it based on the electoral college, which potentially makes the characteristics of individual states decisive. We should be looking at maps, not exit polls for the explanation. Low black turnout in California or high Latino turnout in Texas do not matter in the slightest in determining the election, but exit polls don't help us see that. Exit polls deliver a bunch of non-explanatory facts, in this election more than other recent ones."
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2016/11/11/23174/"Donald Trump performed best on Tuesday in places where the economy is in worse shape, and especially in places where jobs are most at risk in the future.
"Trump, who in his campaign pledged to be a voice for `forgotten Americans,' beat Hillary Clinton in counties with slower job growth and lower wages. And he far outperformed her in counties where more jobs are threatened by automation or offshoring, a sign that he found support not just among workers who are struggling now but among those concerned for their economic future."
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-was-stronger-where-the-economy-is-weaker/
Meanwhile, the neoliberal Democrats made claims about the economy that at best wildly oversold the non-recovery from the 2009 global financial meltdown, and at worst flat-out misrepresented the state of the U.S. economy. For example, president Obama in his June 1 2016 speech in Elkhart Indiana, said:
"Now, one of the reasons we're told this has been an unusual election year is because people are anxious and uncertain about the economy. And our politics are a natural place to channel that frustration. So I wanted to come to the heartland, to the Midwest, back to close to my hometown to talk about that anxiety, that economic anxiety, and what I think it means. (..) America's economy is not just better than it was eight years ago - it is the strongest, most durable economy in the world. (..) Unemployment in Elkhart has fallen to around 4 percent. (Applause.) At the peak of the crisis, nearly one in 10 homeowners in the state of Indiana were either behind on their mortgages or in foreclosure; today, it's one in 30. Back then, only 75 percent of your kids graduated from high school; tomorrow, 90 percent of them will. (Applause.) The auto industry just had its best year ever. (..) So that's progress.(..) We decided to invest in job training so that folks who lost their jobs could retool. We decided to invest in things like high-tech manufacturing and clean energy and infrastructure, so that entrepreneurs wouldn't just bring back the jobs that we had lost, but create new and better jobs By almost every economic measure, America is better off than when I came here at the beginning of my presidency. That's the truth. That's true. (Applause.) It's true. (Applause.) Over the past six years, our businesses have created more than 14 million new jobs - that's the longest stretch of consecutive private sector job growth in our history. We've seen the first sustained manufacturing growth since the 1990s."
None of this is true. Not is a substantive sense, not in the sense of being accurate, not in the sense of reflecting the facts on the ground for real working people who don't fly their private jets to Davos.
The claim that "America's economy is the strongest and most durable economy in the world" is just plain false. China has a much higher growth rate, at 6.9% nearly triple the U.S.'s - and America's GDP growth is trending to historic long-term lows, and still falling. Take a look at this chart of the Federal Reserve board's projections of U.S. GDP growth since 2009 compared with the real GDP growth rate:
http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/files/2015-03-2.png
"[In the survey] [t]he Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all. Four hundred dollars! Who knew?
"Well, I knew. I knew because I am in that 47 percent.
" I know what it is like to have to juggle creditors to make it through a week. I know what it is like to have to swallow my pride and constantly dun people to pay me so that I can pay others. I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5-literally-while I wait for a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs.
I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn't know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil ."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secret-shame/476415/
" Two-thirds of Americans would have difficulty coming up with the money to cover a $1,000 emergency, according to an exclusive poll released Thursday, a signal that despite years after the Great Recession, Americans' finances remain precarious as ever.
" These difficulties span all incomes, according to the poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Three-quarters of people in households making less than $50,000 a year and two-thirds of those making between $50,000 and $100,000 would have difficulty coming up with $1,000 to cover an unexpected bill.
" Even for the country's wealthiest 20 percent - households making more than $100,000 a year - 38 percent say they would have at least some difficulty coming up with $1,000 .
"`The more we learn about the balance sheets of Americans, it becomes quite alarming,' said Caroline Ratcliffe, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute focusing on poverty and emergency savings issues."
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/965e48ed609245539ed315f83e01b6a2
The rest of Obama's statistics are deceptive to the point of being dissimulations - unemployment has dropped to 4 percent because so many people have stopped looking for work and moved into their parents' basements that the Bureau of Labor Statistics no longer counts them as unemployed. Meanwhile, the fraction of working-age adults who are not in the workforce has skyrocketed to an all-time high. Few homeowners are now being foreclosed in 2016 compared to 2009 because the people in 2009 who were in financial trouble all lost their homes. Only rich people and well-off professionals were able to keep their homes through the 2009 financial collapse. Since 2009, businesses did indeed create 14 million new jobs - mostly low-wage junk jobs, part-time minimum-wage jobs that don't pay a living wage.
"The deep recession wiped out primarily high-wage and middle-wage jobs. Yet the strongest employment growth during the sluggish recovery has been in low-wage work, at places like strip malls and fast-food restaurants.
"In essence, the poor economy has replaced good jobs with bad ones."
And the jobs market isn't much better for highly-educated workers:
New research released Monday says nearly half of the nation's recent college graduates work jobs that don't require a degree.
The report, from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, concludes that while college-educated Americans are less likely to collect unemployment, many of the jobs they do have aren't worth the price of their diplomas.
The data calls into question a national education platform that says higher education is better in an economy that favors college graduates.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/29/underemployed-overeducated_n_2568203.html
Don't believe it? Then try this article, from the Chronicle for Higher Education:
Approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled-occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our nation's stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a bachelor's degree or more.
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/the-great-college-degree-scam/28067
As for manufacturing, U.S. manufacturing lost 35,000 jobs in 2016, and manufacturing employment remains 2.2% below what it was when Obama took office.
Meanwhile, 91% of all the profits generated by the U.S. economy from 2009 through 2012 went to the top 1%. As just one example, the annual bonuses (not salaries, just the bonuses) of all Wall Street financial traders last year amounted to 28 billion dollars while the total income of all minimum wage workers in America came to 14 billion dollars.
"Between 2009 and 2012, according to updated data from Emmanuel Saez, overall income per family grew 6.9 percent. The gains weren't shared evenly, however. The top 1 percent saw their real income grow by 34.7 percent while the bottom 99 percent only saw a 0.8 percent gain, meaning that the 1 percent captured 91 percent of all real income.
Adjusting for inflation and excluding anything made from capital gains investments like stocks, however, shows that even that small gains for all but the richest disappears. According to Justin Wolfers, adjusted average income for the 1 percent without capital gains rose from $871,100 to $968,000 in that time period. For everyone else, average income actually fell from $44,000 to $43,900. Calculated this way, the 1 percent has captured all of the income gains."
Does any of this sound like "the strongest, most durable economy in the world"? Does any of this square with the claims by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama that "By almost every economic measure, America is better off "? The U.S. economy is only better off in 2016 by disingenuous comparison with the stygian depths of the 2009 economic collapse.
Hillary Clinton tied herself to Barack Obama's economic legacy, and the brutal reality for working class people remains that the economy today has barely improved for most workers to what it was in 2009, and is in many ways worse. Since 2009, automation + outsourcing/offshoring has destroyed whole classes of jobs, from taxi drivers (wiped out by Uber and Lyft) to warehoues stock clerks (getting wiped out by robots) to paralegals and associates at law firms (replaced by databases and legal search algorithms) to high-end programmers (wiped out by an ever-increasing flood of H1B via workers from India and China).
Yet vox.com continues to run article after article proclaiming "the 2016 election was all about racism." And we have a non-stop stream of this stuff from people like Anne Laurie over at balloon-juice.com:
"While the more-Leftist-than-thou "progressives" - including their latest high-profile figurehead - are high-fiving each other in happy anticipation of potential public-outrage gigs over the next four years, at least some people are beginning to push back on the BUT WHITE WORKING CLASS HAS ALL THE SADS!!! meme so beloved of Very Serious Pundits."
That's the ticket, Democrats double down on the identity politics, keep telling the pulverized middle class how great the economy is. Because that worked so well for you this election.
Cranky Observer 11.16.16 at 12:34 pm ( 11 )
= = = mclaren@9:52 am: The rest of Obama's statistics are deceptive to the point of being dissimulations -[ ] Only rich people and well-off professionals were able to keep their homes through the 2009 financial collapse. = = =
Some food for thought in your post, but you don't help your argument with statements such as this one. Rich people and well-off professionals make up at most 10% of the population. US homeownership rate in 2005 was 68.8%, in 2015 is 63.7. That's a big drop and unquestionably represents a lot of people losing their houses involuntarily. Still, even assuming no "well-off professionals" lost their houses in the recession that still leaves the vast majority of the houses owned by the middle class. Which is consistent with foreclosure and sales stats in middle class areas from 2008-2014. Remember that even with 20% unemployment 80% of the population still has a job.
Similarly, I agree that the recession and job situation was qualitatively worse than the quantitative stats depicted. Once you start adding in hidden factors not captured by the official stats, though, where do you stop? How do you know the underground economy isn't doing far better than it was in the boom years of the oughts, thus reducing actual unemployment? Etc.
Finally, you need to address the fundamental question: assuming all you say is true (arguendo), how does destroying the Affordable Care Act, Social Security, and Medicare help those in the economically depressed areas? I got hit bad by the recession myself. Know what helped from 2010 forward? Knowing that I could change jobs, keep my college-age children on my spouse's heath plan, not get hit with pre-existing condition fraud, and that if worse came to worse in a couple years I would have the plan exchange to fall back on. Kansas has tried the Ryan/Walker approach, seen it fail, doubled down, and seen that fail 4x as badly. Now we're going to make it up on unit sales by trying the Ryan plan nationally? How do you expect that to "work out for you"?
WLGR 11.16.16 at 4:11 pm
mclaren @ 7: "high-end programmers (wiped out by an ever-increasing flood of H1B via workers from India and China)"I'm on board with the general thrust of what you're saying, but this is way, way over the line separating socialism from barbarism. The fact that it's not even true is beside the point, as is the (quite frankly) fascist metaphor of "flood" to describe human fucking beings traveling in search of economic security, at least as long as you show some self-awareness and contrition about your language. Some awareness about the insidious administrative structure of the H1-B program would also be nice - the way it works is, an individual's visa status more or less completely depends on remaining in the good graces of their employer, meaning that by design these employees have no conceivable leverage in any negotiation over pay or working conditions, and a program of unconditional residency without USCIS as a de facto strikebreaker would have much less downward pressure on wages - but anti-immigration rhetoric remaining oblivious to actual immigration law is par for the course.
No, the real point of departure here from what deserves to be called "socialism" is in the very act of blithely combining effects of automation (i.e. traditional capitalist competition for productive efficiency at the expense of workers' economic security) and effects of offshoring/outsourcing/immigration (i.e. racialized fragmentation of the global working class by accident of birth into those who "deserve" greater economic security and those who don't) into one and the same depiction of developed-world economic crisis. In so many words, you're walking right down neoliberal capitalism's ideological garden path: the idea that it's not possible to be anticapitalist without being an economic nationalist, and that every conceivable alternative to some form of Hillary Clinton is ultimately reducible to some form of Donald Trump. On the contrary, those of us on the socialism side of "socialism or barbarism" don't object to capitalism because it's exploiting American workers , we object because it's exploiting workers , and insisting on this crucial point against all chauvinist pressure ("workers of all lands , unite!") is what fundamentally separates our anticapitalism from the pseudo-anticapitalism of fascists.
marku52 11.16.16 at 5:01 pm 16
Maclaren: I'm with you. I well remember Obama and his "pivot to deficit reduction" and "green shoots" while I was screaming at the TV 'No!! Not Now!"
And then he tried for a "grand bargain" with the Reps over chained CPI adjustment for SS, and he became my active enemy. I was a Democrat. Where did my party go?
politicalfootball 11.16.16 at 5:27 pm ( 17 )
Just chiming in here: The implicit deal between the elites and the hoi polloi was that the economy would be run with minimal competence. Throughout the west, those elites have broken faith with the masses on that issue, and are being punished for it.I'm less inclined to attach responsibility to Obama, Clinton or the Democratic Party than some. If Democrats had their way, the economy would have been managed considerably more competently.
Always remember that the rejection of the elites wasn't just a rejection of Democrats. The Republican elite also took it in the neck.
I'll also dissent from the view that race wasn't decisive in this election. Under different circumstances, we might have had Bernie's revolution rather than Trump's, but Trump's coalition is composed of overt racists and people who are indifferent to overt racism.
engels 11.16.16 at 7:12 pm 18
I find the discussions over identity politics so intensely frustrating. A lot of people on the left have gone all-in on self-righteous anger
Identity politics (and to some extent probably the rhetorical style that goes with it) isn't a 'left' thing, it's a liberal thing. It's a bęte noire for many on the left-see eg. Nancy Fraser's work.
The Anglo/online genus what you get when you subtract class, socialism and real-world organisation from politics and add in a lot of bored students and professionals with internet connections in the context of a political culture (America's) that already valorises individual aggression to a unique degree.
Omega Centauri 11.16.16 at 7:15 pm ( 19 )
As polticalfoorball @15 says. The Democrats just didn't have the political muscle to deliver on those things. There really is a dynamic thats been playing out: Democrats don't get enough governing capacity because they did poorly in the election, which means their projects to improve the economy are neutered or allowed through only in a very weakened form. Then the next election cycle the neuterers use that failure as a weapon to take even more governing capacity away. Its not a failure of will, its a failure to get on top of the political feedback loop.Manta 11.16.16 at 7:32 pm 20
@15 politicalfootball 11.16.16 at 5:27 pm
"Throughout the west, those elites have broken faith with the masses on that issue, and are being punished for it."Could you specify some "elite" that has been punished?
nastywoman 11.16.16 at 7:36 pm ( 21 )
@13
'I'm not sure what the thinking is here.'The definition of 'Keynesianism' is:
'the economic theories and programs ascribed to John M. Keynes and his followers; specifically : the advocacy of monetary and fiscal programs by government to increase employment and spending'
– and if it is done wisely – like in most European countries before 2000 it is one of the least 'braindead' things.
But with the introduction of the Euro – some governmental programs – lead (especially in Spain) to horrendous self-destructive housing and building bubbles – which lead to the conclusion that such programs – which allow 'gambling with houses' are pretty much 'braindead'.
Or shorter: The quality of Keynesianism depends on NOT doing it 'braindead'.
mclaren 11.16.16 at 8:28 pm ( 25 )
Cranky Observer in #11 makes some excellent points. Crucially, he asks: "Finally, you need to address the fundamental question: assuming all you say is true (arguendo), how does destroying the Affordable Care Act, Social Security, and Medicare help those in the economically depressed areas?"There actually is a logic at work in the Rust Belt voters for voted for Trump. I don't think it's good logic, but it makes sense in its own warped way. The calculation the Trump voters seem to be making in the Rust Belt is that it's better to have a job and no health insurance and no medicare and no social security, than no job but the ACA (with $7,000 deductibles you can't afford to pay for anyway) plus medicare (since most of these voters are healthy, they figure they'll never get sick) plus social security (most of these voters are not 65 or older, and probably think they'll never age - or perhaps don't believe that social security will be solvent when they do need it).
It's the same twisted logic that goes on with protectionism. Rust Belt workers figure that it's better to have a job and not be able to afford a Chinese-made laptop than not to have a job but plenty of cheap foreign-made widgets you could buy if you had any money (which you don't). That logic doesn't parse if you run through the economics (because protectionism will destroy the very jobs they think they're saving), but it can be sold as a tweet in a political campaign.
As for 63.7% home ownership stats in 2016, vast numbers of those "owned" homes were snapped up by giant banks and other financial entities like hedge funds which then rented those homes out. So the home ownership stats in 2016 are extremely deceptive. Much of the home-buying since the 2009 crash has been investment purchases. Foreclosure home purchases for rent is now a huge thriving business, and it's fueling a second housing bubble. Particularly because in many ways it repeats the financially frothy aspects of the early 2000s housing bubble - banks and investment firms are issuing junks bonds based on rosy estimates of ever-escalating rents and housing prices, they use those junk financial instruments (and others like CDOs) to buy houses which then get rented out at inflated prices, the rental income gets used to fund more tranches of investment which fuels more buy-to-rent home buying. Rents have already skyrocketed far beyond incomes on the East and West Coast, so this can't continue. But home prices and rents keep rising. There is no city in the United States today where a worker making minimum wage can afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment and have money left over to eat and pay for a car, health insurance, etc. If home ownership were really so robust, this couldn't possibly be the case. The fact that rents keep skyrocketing even as undocumented hispanics return to Mexico in record numbers while post-9/11 ICE restrictions have hammered legal immigration numbers way, way down suggests that home ownership is not nearly as robust as the deceptive numbers indicate.
Political football in #15 remarks: "I'll also dissent from the view that race wasn't decisive in this election. Under different circumstances, we might have had Bernie's revolution rather than Trump's, but Trump's coalition is composed of overt racists and people who are indifferent to overt racism."
Race was important, but not the root cause of the Trump victory. How do we know this? Tump himself is telling us. Look at Trump's first announced actions - deport 3 million undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, ram through vast tax cuts for the rich, and end the inheritance tax.
If Trump's motivation (and his base's motivation) was pure racism, Trump's first announced action would be something like passing laws that made it illegal to marry undocumented workers. His first act would be to roll back the legalization of black/white marriage and re-instate segregation. Trump isn't promising any of that.
Instead Trump's (bad) policies are based around enriching billionaires and shutting down immigration. Bear in mind that 43% of all new jobs created since 2009 went to immigrants and you start to realize that Trump's base is reacting to economic pressure by scapegoating immigrants, not racism by itself. If it were pure racism we'd have Trump and Ryan proposing a bunch of new Nuremberg laws. Make it illegal to have sex with muslims, federally fund segregated black schools and pass laws to force black kids to get bussed to them, create apartheid-style zones where only blacks can live, that sort of thing. Trump's first announced actions involve enriching the fantastically wealthy and enacting dumb self-destructive protectionism via punitive immigration control. That's protectionism + class war of the rich against everyone else, not racism. The protectionist immigration-control + deportation part of Trump's program is sweet sweet music to the working class people in the Rust Belt. They think the 43% of jobs taken by immigrants will come back. They don't realize that those are mostly jobs no one wants to do anyway, and that most of those jobs are already in the process of getting automated out of existence.
The claim "Trump's coalition is composed of overt racists and people who are indifferent to overt racism" is incomplete. Trump's coalition actually consists of 3 parts and it's highly unstable: [1] racists, [2] plutocrats, [3] working class people slammed hard by globalization for whom Democrats have done little or nothing.
Here's an argument that may resonate: the first two groups in Trump's coalition are unreachable. Liberal Democrats can't sweet-talk racists out of being racist and we certainly have nothing to offer the plutocrats. So the only part of Trump's coalition that is really reachable by liberal Democrats is the third group. Shouldn't we be concentrating on that third group, then?
The good news is that Trump's coalition is unstable. The plutocrats and Rust Belters are natural enemies. Since the plutocrats are perceived as running giant corporations that import large numbers of non-white immigrants to lower wages, the racists are not big fans of that group either.
Listen to Steve Bannon, a classic stormfront type - he says he wants to blow up both the Democratic and the Republican party. He calls himself a "Leninist" in a recent interview and vows to wreck all elite U.S. institutions (universities, giant multinationals), not just the Democratic party.
Why? Because the stormfront types consider elite U.S. institutions like CitiBank as equally culpable with Democrats in supposedly destroying white people in the U.S. According to Bannon's twisted skinhead logic, Democrats are allegedly race traitors for cultural reasons, but big U.S. corporations and elite institutions are supposedly equally guilty of economic race treason by importing vast numbers of non-white immigrants via H1B visas, by offshoring jobs from mostly caucasian-populated red states to non-white countries like India, Africa, China, and by using elite U.S. universities to trawl the world for the best (often non-white) students, etc. Bannon's "great day of the rope" includes the plutocrats as well as people of color.
These natural fractures in the Trump coalition are real, and Democrats can exploit them to weaken and destroy Republicans. But we have to get away from condemning all Republicans as racists because if we go down that route, we won't realize how fractured and unstable the Trump coalition really is.
bruce wilder 11.16.16 at 10:33 pm 31 ( 31 )
The short version of my thinking on the Obama stimulus is this: Keynesian stimulus spending is a free lunch; it doesn't really matter what you spend money on up to a very generous point, so it seems ready-made for legislative log-rolling. If Obama could not get a very big stimulus indeed thru a Democratic Congress long out of power, Obama wasn't really trying. And, well-chosen spending on pork barrel projects is popular and gets Congressional critters re-elected. So, again, if the stimulus is small and the Democratic Congress doesn't get re-elected, Obama isn't really trying.Again, it comes down to: by 2008, the Democratic Party is not a fit vehicle for populism, because it has become a neoliberal vehicle for giant banks. Turns out that makes a policy difference.
engels 11.16.16 at 10:33 pm 32
Ps. Should prob add that identity politics isn't the same thing as feminism, anti-racism, LGBT politics, etc. They're all needed now more than ever.
What we don't need more of imo is a particular liberal/middle-class form of those things with particular assumptions (meritocratic and individualist), epistemology (strongly subjectivist) and rhetorical style (which often aims humiliating opponents from a position of relative knowledge/status rather than verbal engagement).
Helen 11.16.16 at 10:35 pm ( 33 )
I don't know why I'm even having to say this, as it's so obvious. The "leftists" (for want of a better word) and feminists who I know are also against neoliberalism. They are against the selloff of public assets to enterprises for private profit. They want to see a solution to the rapidly shrinking job market as technology replaces jobs (no, it's not enough for the Heroic Workers to Seize the Means of Production – the means of production are different now and the solution is going to have to be more complex than just "bring back manufacturing" or "introduce tariffs".) They want to roll back the tax cuts for the rich which have whittled down our revenue base this century. They want corporations and the top 10% to pay their fair share, and concomitantly they want pensioners, the unemployed and people caring for children to have a proper living wage.They support a universal "single payer" health care system, which we social democratic squishy types managed to actually introduce in the 1970s, but now we have to fight against right wing governments trying to roll it back They support a better system of public education. They support a science-based approach to climate change where it is taken seriously for the threat it is and given priority in Government policy. They support spending less on the Military and getting out of international disputes which we (Western nations) only seem to exacerbate.
This is not an exhaustive list.
Yet just because the same people say that the dominant Western countries (and my own) still suffer from institutionalised racism and sexism, which is not some kind of cake icing but actually ruin lives and kill people, we are "all about identity politics" and cannot possibly have enough brain cells to think about the issues I described in para 1.
I don't find it instructive or useful.
Main Street Muse 11.16.16 at 10:54 pm 34
The slow recovery was only one factor. Wages have been stagnant since Reagan. And honestly, if a white Republican president had stabilized the economy, killed Osama Bin Laden and got rid of pre-existing condition issue with healthcare, the GOP would be BRAGGING all over it. Let's remember that we have ONE party that has been devoted to racist appeals, lying and putting party over country for decades.
Obama entered office as the economy crashed over a cliff. Instead of reforming the banks and punishing the bankers who engaged in fraudulent activities, he waded into healthcare reform. Banks are bigger today than they were in 2008. And tell me again, which bankers were punished for the fraud? Not a one All that Repo 105 maneuvering, stuffing the retirement funds with toxic assets – etc. and so on – all of that was perfectly legal? And if legal, all of that was totally bonusable? Yes! In America, such failure is gifted with huge bonuses, thanks to the American taxpayer.
Meanwhile, homeowners saw huge drops the value of their homes. Some are still underwater with the mortgage. It's a shame that politicians and reporters in DC don't get out much.
Concurrently, right before the election, ACA premiums skyrocketed. If you are self-insured, ACA is NOT affordable. It doesn't matter that prior to ACA, premiums increased astronomically. Obama promised AFFORDABLE healthcare. In my state, we have essentially a monopoly on health insurance, and the costs are absurd. But that's in part because the state Republicans refused to expand Medicaid.
Don't underestimate HRC's serious issues. HRC had one speech for the bankers and another for everyone else. Why didn't she release the GS transcripts? When did the Democrats become the party of Wall Street?
She also made the same idiotic mistake that Romney did – disparage a large swathe of American voters (basket of deplorables is this year's 47%.)
And then we had a nation of voters intent on the outsider. Bernie Sanders had an improbable run at it – the Wikileaks emails showed that the DNC did what they could to get rid of him as a threat.
Well America has done and gone elected themselves an outsider. Lucky us.
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Nov 16, 2016 | www.unz.com
As the troubled Obama presidency winds down, the inevitable question is why so many people, including a few smart ones were so easily fooled. How did a man with such a fine pedigree-Columbia, Harvard-who sounded so brilliant pursue such political capital wasting and foolish policies as forcing schools to discipline students by racial quotas? Or obsessing over allowing the transgendered to choose any bathroom? And, of the utmost importance, how can we prevent another Obama?I'll begin simply: Obama is an imposter, a man who has mastered the art of deception as a skilled actor deceives an audience though in the case of Obama, most of the audience refused to accept that this was all play-acting. Even after almost eight years of ineptitude, millions still want to believe that he's the genuine article-an authentically super-bright guy able to fix a flawed America. Far more is involved than awarding blacks the intellectual equivalent of diplomatic immunity.
When Obama first appeared on the political scene I immediately recognized him as an example of the "successful" black academic who rapidly advances up the university ladder despite minimal accomplishment. Tellingly, when I noted the paucity of accomplishment of these black academic over-achievers to trusted professorial colleagues, they agreed with my analysis adding that they themselves had seen several instances of this phenomenon, but admittedly failed to connect the dots.
Here's the academic version of an Obama. You encounter this black student who appears a liberal's affirmative action dream come true -- exceptionally articulate with no trace of a ghetto accent, well-dressed, personable (no angry "tude"), and at least superficially sufficient brain power to succeed even in demanding subjects. Matters begin splendidly, but not for long. Almost invariably, his or her performance on the first test or paper falls far below expectations. A research paper, for example was only "C" work (though you generously awarded it a "B") and to make matters worse, it exhibited a convoluted writing style, a disregard for logic, ineptly constructed references and similar defects. Nevertheless, you accepted the usual litany of student excuses -- his claim of over-commitment, the material was unfamiliar, and this was his first research paper and so on. A reprieve was granted.
But the unease grows stronger with the second exam or paper, often despite your helpful advice on how to do better. Reality grows depressing -- what you see is not what you get and lacks any reasonable feel-good explanation. The outwardly accomplished black student is not an Asian struggling with English or a clear-cut affirmation action admittee in over his head. That this student may have actually studied diligently and followed your advice only exacerbates the discomfort.
To repeat, the way to make sense out this troubling situation is to think of this disappointing black student as a talented actor who has mastered the role of "smart college student." He has the gift of mimicry, conceivably a talent rooted in evolutionary development among a people who often had to survive by their wits (adaptive behavior captured by the phrase "acting white" or "passing"). This gift is hardly limited to blacks. I can recall tales of insecure Eastern European Jewish immigrants pretending to be WASPS.
But what if the observer was unaware of it being only a theatrical performance and took the competence at face value? Disaster. Russell Crowe as the Nobel Prize winning John Nash in A Beautiful Mind might give a stunning performance as a brilliant economist, but he would not last a minute if he tried to pass himself off as the real thing at a Princeton economic department seminar. To be blunt, Barack Obama was less "a president" than a talented actor playing at being presidential.
Those of us who have encountered this deception are usually aware of its tell-tale signs, though, to be fair, it may have been diligently practiced for so long that it has become a "real" element of the perpetrator's core personality. For those unfamiliar with this deception, let me now offer a brief catalogue of these tactics.
Central is the careful management of outward physical appearances. In theatrical terms, these are props and depending on circumstances, this might be a finely tailored suit, wingtip shoes, a crisp white shirt, a smart silk tie and all the rest that announce business-like competence. Future college or foundation president here we come (Obama has clearly mastered this sartorial ploy). But for those seeking an appointment as a professor, this camouflage must be more casual but, whatever the choice, there cannot be any hint of "ghetto" style, i.e., no flashy jewelry, gold chains, purple "pimpish" suits, or anything else that even slightly hints of what blacks might consider authentic black attire.
Mastering "white" language is equally critical and in the academy this includes everything from tossing around trendy terms, for example, "paradigmatic," to displaying what appears to be a mastering of disciplinary jargon. Recall how the Black Panthers seduced gullible whites with just a sprinkling of Marxist terminology. Precisely citing a few obscure court cases or administrative directives can also do the trick. Further add certain verbal styles common among professors or peppering a presentation with correctly pronounced non-English words. I recall a talk by one black professor from the University of Chicago who wowed my colleagues by just using-and correctly so-a few Yiddish expressions.
Ironically, self-defined conservatives are especially vulnerable to these well-crafted performances. No doubt, like all good thinking liberals, they desperately want to believe that blacks are just as talented as whites so an Obama-like figure is merely the first installment of coming racial equality. The arrival of this long-awaited black also provides a great opportunity to demonstrate that being "conservative" does not certify one as a racist. Alas, this can be embarrassing and comical if over-done. I recall one (white) colleague who gave a little speech praising a deeply flawed dissertation written by a black assistant professor up for tenure. He told the assembled committee that her dissertation reminded him of Newton's Principia Mathematica (can't make that stuff up).
Alas, the deception usually unravels when the imposter confronts a complicated unstructured situation lacking a well-defined script, hardly surprising given the IQ test data indicate that blacks usually perform better on items reflecting social norms, less well on abstract, highly "g" loaded items. In academic job presentations, for example, a job candidate's intellectual limits often become apparent during the Q and A when pressed to wrestle with technical or logical abstractions that go beyond the initial well-rehearsed talk. Picture a job candidate who just finished reading a paper being asked whether the argument is falsifiable or how causality might be established? These can be killer questions that require ample quick footed intellectual dexterity and often bring an awkward silence as the candidate struggles to think on his feet (these responses may rightly be judged far more important than what is read from a paper). I recall one genuinely bewildered black job candidate who explained a complicated measurement choice with "my Ph.D. advisor, a past president of the American Political Science Association told me to do it this way."
Obama as President repeatedly exhibits these characteristics. It is thus hardly accidental that he relies extensively on canned Teleprompter speeches. According to one compilation published in January 2013, Obama has used Teleprompters in 699 speeches during his first term in office. There is also his aversion to informal off-the-cuff discussions with the press and open mike who-knows-what-will-happen "Town Hall" meetings. Obama is also the first president I've ever seen who often favors a casual blue jacket monogrammed "President of the United States."
Perhaps the best illustration of these confused, often rambling moments occurs when he offers impromptu commentary on highly charged, fast-breaking race-related incidents such as the Louis Henry Gates dustup in Cambridge , Mass ("the police acted stupidly") and the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown shootings. You could see his pained look as he struggles with being a "good race man" while simultaneously struggling to sort out murky legal issues. This is not the usual instances of politicians speaking evasively to avoid controversy; he was genuinely befuddled.
Similar signs of confused thinking can also be seen in other spontaneous remarks, the most famous example might be his comment about those Americans clinging to their guns and Bibles. What was he thinking? Did he forget that both gun and Bible ownership are constitutionally protected and the word "cling" in this context suggests mental illness? Woes to some impertinent reporter who challenged the President to clarify his oft-repeated "the wrong side of history" quip or explain the precise meaning of, "That's not who were are"? "Mr. President, can you enlighten us on how you know you are on the Right Side of History"?
I suspect that deep down Obama recognizes that almost everything is an act not unlike Eddy Murphy playing Professor Sherman Klump in The Nutty Professor . It is no wonder, then, that his academic records (particularly his SAT scores) are sealed and, perhaps even more important, many of his fellow college students and colleagues at the University of Chicago where he briefly taught constitutional law cannot recall him. It is hard to imagine Obama relishing the prospect of going head-to-head with his sharp-witted Chicago colleagues.
Further add his lack of a publication in the Harvard Law Review, a perk as the President of the Law Review (not Editor) and the credible evidence that his two autobiographies where ghost written after their initial rejection as unsuitable for publication. All and all, a picture emerges of an individual who knows he must fake it to convince others of his intellectual talents, and like a skilled actor he has spent years studying the role of "President." President Obama deserves an Academy award (which, of course would also be a step toward diversity, to boot) for his efforts.
Carlton Meyer says: • WebsiteNovember 16, 2016 at 5:31 am GMT • 300 Words
This is why I often referred to Obama as a "Pentagon spokesman." Did you know his proposed military budgets each year were on average higher than Bush or Reagan? People forget that is first objective as President was to close our torture camp in Cuba. He could have issued an Executive Order and have it closed in one day. DOJ aircraft could fly all the inmates away within two hours before any court could challenge that, if they dared. It remains open.
Yet when Congress refused to act to open borders wider, he issued an Executive Order to grant residency to five million illegals. And under Soros direction, he sent DoJ attack dogs after any state or city that questioned the right of men who want to use a ladies room.
As a mulatto raised by white grandparents in Hawaii, Obama is not a black American, with no cultural ties to black Americans and slavery, yet he later learned to throw out a black accent to fool the fools. As Stephen Colbert once observed, white Americans love Obama because he was raised the right way, by white people. That was intended as humor, but
Obama has leased an ultra-expensive house in an exclusive neighborhood in DC just like the corrupt Bill Clinton prior to his multi-million dollar speaking and influence peddling efforts. Obama will not return to Chicago to help poor blacks, like Jimmy Carter did elsewhere after he left office. Obama doesn't need an Oscar, he got a Nobel Peace Prize for the same act.
3.anon says:November 16, 2016 at 5:34 am GMT • 100 Words
What to make of the Michael Eric Dysons and the Cornell Wests of the world ??
How do they rise up the ranks of academia , become darlings of talk shows and news panels , all the while dressed and speaking ghetto with zero talent or interest in appearing white . And zero academic competency ??
6.CCZ, November 16, 2016 at 6:08 am GMTOur first affirmative action President? I have yet to hear that exact description, even in a nation with 60 million deplorable "racist" voters.
8.Tom Welsh, November 16, 2016 at 7:00 am GMT • 100 Words
Congratulations on noticing what it takes to be a successful politician in ANY "Western" democracy. It doesn't matter if you are black, white, aquamarine or candy-striped, or whether you are a college professor, an "economist", or a "businessman". It's all bluff and acting.
Why does anyone still find this surprising?
11.Alfa158, November 16, 2016 at 7:56 am GMT • 100 Words
The single most critical element of a successful con is not the hucksters appearance, or mannerisms, or even the spiel, it is simply making the con something that the sucker wants to believe. White people were desperate for a Magic Negro and they got one. Black people ended up suffering from deteriorating economics and exploding intramural murder rates.
12.whorefinder, November 16, 2016 at 8:02 am GMT • 300 Words
Strikes a chord with me, and with Clint Eastwood (recall the 2012 RNC, where Eastwood mocked Obama as an "empty chair").
I recognized Obama's type not from academia, but from corporate America. He was the token black higher up. He's smart enough not to obviously do something requiring termination (get drunk and harass a colleague at an office party, shred important document, etc.), and his mistakes can be blamed on team failures, so he gets "black guy's tenure"-a middle or upper management position after only a few years.
He then makes sure he shows up every weekday at 9am, but he's out the door at 5pm-and no weekends for him. He's there for "diversity" drives and is prominently featured on the company brochures, and might even be given an award or honorary title every few years to cover him, but he never brings in clients or moves business positively in anyway. But he's quick to take the boss up on the golfing trips. In short, he's realized he's there to be the black corporate shield, and that's all he does. He's a lazy token and fine with being lazy.
It's why Obama had little problem letting Pelosi/Reid/Bill Clinton do all the heavy lifting on Obamacare–not only was Obama out of his depth, he was just plain ol' fine with being out of his depth, because someone else would do it for him. So he went golfing instead.
This is also why that White House press conference where Bill Clinton took over for him halfway speaks volumes. Obama literally had no problem simply walking away from his presidential duties to go party-because someone else would do it for him, as they always had.
It's also why he seems so annoyed when asked about the race rioting going on as a result of his administration's actions. Hey, why do you think I gotta do anything? I just show up and people tell me I did a great job!
13.Ramona, November 16, 2016 at 8:04 am GMT
It's been said for years that Obama amounts to no more than a dignified talk show host. The observation has merit. Oscar-wise, though, only for ironic value.
15.Realist, November 16, 2016 at 9:50 am GMT • 100 Words@Anon
"I think Obama is pretty smart if not genius. His mother was no dummy, and his father seems to have been pretty bright too, and there are smart blacks."
Ann Dunham had a PhD in anthropology from a run of the mill university where she literally studied women textile weaving in third world countries. Pure genius .right.
16.Fran Macadam, November 16, 2016 at 9:54 am GMT • 100 WordsThis critique applies to almost every Presidential candidate, regardless of ethnicity. So few of them have been other than those playing a role assigned by their donors. The most successful recent President was a former professional actor and thus well suited for the position. The latest President-elect is also a savvy media figure, and yet mocked for his obvious lack of intellectual heft. But in his case, he's not acting, it's reality TV.
17.Jim Christian says:November 16, 2016 at 9:59 am GMT • 200 Words
@AnonPS. Maybe some Jews around Trump are beginning to feel that China is the real danger to US power in the long run. So, what US should really do is patch things up with Russia for the time being, drive a wedge between China and Russia, and use Russia against China and then go after Russia.
Really! Go after Russia? And how would you do that and why? What would "going after Russia" look like? What about the "horrific Rape of Russia" you spoke of? China and Russia have business to conduct, they're quite through with us, our dollar and our Fed. We'll be lucky if they allow us a piece of the action. Instead of Russia>China>Russia machinations, we might want to figure out strategies for doing some other business than patronizing our arms manufacturers. Hey, cap Jewish influence in the courts and business if you wish, but keeping the U.S. in an endless state of war, economic and otherwise is zero sum and worse for the little people.
20.timalex, November 16, 2016 at 11:58 am GMTAmericans voted for and elected Obama because it made them feel virtuous in their mind and in the eyes of the world. Obama has always been a psychopath. Psychopaths are good at lying and hiding things,even when Presidents.
21.The Alarmist , November 16, 2016 at 12:03 pm GMT
So, you're saying he was an affirmative action hire.
22.Anon, November 16, 2016 at 12:28 pm GMTYeah and every white person in a position of power and privilege is "authentically intelligent". America is a society run by and for phonies.
23.War for Blair Mountain, November 16, 2016 at 12:32 pm GMT • 100 Words
Barack Obama is a creation of the Cold War. His father was imported into the US through an anti-commie Cold War foreign student program for young Africans. Barack Obama's nonwhite Democratic Party Voting Bloc would not exist if the 1965 Immigration Reform Act had not been passed. The 1965 Immigration Reform Act was another creation of the anti-commie Cold War Crusade.
The anti-commie Cold War Crusade has been a Death sentence for The Historic Native Born White American Majority.
It is now time to rethink the Cold War .very long overdue..
24.AndrewR, November 16, 2016 at 12:55 pm GMT • 100 Words
@CCZ
I've called him that for years. And Dubya was possibly our first "legacy" president: chosen entirely based on whom he's related to not on any individual qualities that would suit him for such a high office. Had Dubya been raised by regular people, he would have probably ended up as a hardware store manager.
25.Rehmat, November 16, 2016 at 1:36 pm GMT • 100 Words
I think after wining Nobel Peace Award without achieving peace anywhere in the world – Obama deserve Oscar more than Nobel Prize for equating Holocaust as a religion with Christianity and Islam in his speech at the UNGA in September 2012.
Oscar has a long tradition to award top slot for every Holocaust movie produced so far.
"There's no business like Shoah business," says YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, established by Max Weinreich in Lithuania in 1925.
More than 70 movies and documentary on Jewish Holocaust have been produced so far to keep Whiteman's guild alive. Holocaust Industry's main purpose is to suck trillions of dollars and moral support for the Zionist entity. Since 1959 movie, The Diary of Anne Frank, 22 Holocaust movies have won at least one Oscar ..
https://rehmat1.com/2012/10/26/barack-obama-holocaust-is-a-religion/
27.jacques sheete says: November 16, 2016 at 2:20 pm GMT • 200 Words
@Tom Welsh
Amen to all. The whole deal is a fraud. All successful politicians are imposters, people who've mastered the art of deception. I'd go even further and say that the majority of "authority figures" are probably parasites and frauds to one degree or another.
I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself – that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle.
- H. L. Mencken, Last Words (1926)
28.anonymous, November 16, 2016 at 2:34 pm GMT • 200 Words
The bar was set ridiculously low by his predecessor the village idiot Bush who could barely put together a coherent sentence. After eight years of disaster people were hoping for something different. Having a deranged person like McCain as his opposition certainly helped. What choice did the American people have?
He received a Nobel Peace prize for absolutely nothing although I admit his reluctance to barge into Syria was quite welcome. How many wars would we be in had the war-crazed McCain gotten into office?
Overall, the current president has been a deception, a trivial self-absorbed person whose main concern has been himself turned outward onto issues of race and sexual orientation.
American politics at this level is fake. Everything is orchestrated, attire is handpicked, speeches are written by professionals and read off the teleprompter, questions from the public are actually from plants and rehearsed prior, armies of PR people are at work everywhere, journalists are just flunky propagandists, expressions of emotion are calculated, the mass media is the property of the billionaire and corporate class and reflects their interests, and so on down the line. The masses of Americans are just there to be managed and milked. Look back at the history of the US: When haven't they been lying to us?
29.nsa, November 16, 2016 at 2:44 pm GMT • 100 Words
President is a very easy job. Almost anyone could fake it even actors, peanut farmers, mulatto community organizers, illegitimate offspring of trailer park whores, haberdashers, developers, soldiers, irish playboys, bicycle riding dry drunks, low rent CA shysters, daft professors.
Play lots of golf. Hot willing young pussy available for the asking. Anyone call you a name, have them audited. Invite pals onto the gravy train. Everyone kissing your ass and begging for favors. Media nitwits hanging on every word. Afterwards, get filthy rich making speeches and appearances. Tough job .
30.Anonymous, November 16, 2016 at 3:03 pm GMT • 100 Words
Manchurian Candidate, or Kenyan Candidate? Whatever he may be called, our current White House resident is a colossal joke perpetrated on the world. Whoever covered all his tracks did a masterful task. He will be the subject of future dissertations about the failure of the American political process and the influence of media and third parties like Soros.
32.Lorax, November 16, 2016 at 3:17 pm GMT
Obama's grandfather, Stanley Armour Dunham, was a "furniture salesman," for which role he deserved an Oscar as well. It takes real acting ability to pull off a lifetime career in Intelligence Service: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/08/07/obama's-cia-pedigree/
34.JoeFour, November 16, 2016 at 3:56 pm GMT
@AndrewR
"Had Dubya been raised by regular people, he would have probably ended up as a hardware store manager."
AndrewR, I know you didn't mean it, but you have just insulted all of the thousands of hardware store managers in this country.
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www.unz.com
'Bill always campaigned as a guy who felt your pain, but Hillary came across as someone who was pissed off at her enemy [Trump], not someone who was reaching out and trying to make life better for the white working class.'
'Bill also said that many African Americans were deeply disappointed with the results of eight years of Obama,' the source continued.
'Despite more and more government assistance, black weren't economically any better off, and black-on-black crime was destroying their communities. He said Hillary should have gone into the South Side of Chicago and condemned the out-of-control violence.'
'A big part of Bill's anger toward Hillary was that he was sidelined during the entire campaign by her advisers,' said the source. 'He can't be effective if he sees himself as just another hired hand. He wasn't listened to and that infuriated him. After all, he knows something about campaigns, and he told me in early October that Hillary and her advisers were blowing it.
'Hillary wouldn't listen. She told Bill that his ideas were old and that he was out of touch. In the end, there was nothing he could do about it because Hillary and her people weren't listening to anything he said.'
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Nov 16, 2016 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Greg T November 16, 2016 at 2:05 pmI read all of these points and conclude that Bernie Sanders would have defeated Trump in the general election. Sanders would have held all of the Democratic strongholds, and he would have beaten Trump in the Midwest.
Of course, the DNC was too busy trying to blow the Sanders campaign to smithereens and Hillary decided that comforting the Democrat Party's donor base was more important than attracting working class voters in the Rust Belt.
This is evidence that the elites in the Democrat Party would rather lose with a ' made ' candidate than win with an outsider.
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Nov 16, 2016 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Talking Point: The Clinton Campaign Was Well-ManagedTalking Point: The Clinton Defeat Had Nothing To Do With EconomicsHere are two examples of the talking point. From the Washington Post (November 10, 2016):
At Brooklyn headquarters on Wednesday, Podesta expressed his gratitude and support for the team, and for Mook. "We have the No. 1 campaign manager," he said, in a staffwide gathering in the afternoon. "I've been doing this since 1968, and I've never seen a culture and a spirit like we created in this campaign." On the conference call with thousands of staff across the country, Clinton also called in [how kind] and thanked her team for their dedication.
Mook tried to end the campaign on a high note.
"What you've created is going to live on," he told his troops. "Leaders all over this country, local networks around the nation, future candidates who are going to step forward. Someone in this room is going to manage a presidential campaign one day."
To be fair, Clinton is correct that "there are lots of reasons," in an election this close. However, to me, blaming Comey is like blaming the last pebble in an avalanche of #FAIL. Sanders asks the right question. Talking about the Comey letters , Sanders said:Here's an example of the talking point. From, naturally, Amanda Marcotte (November 11, 2016):
Because this anger is so real and so palpable, there's been an unfortunate tendency in much of the media to assume that this anger must also be valid . The entire election cycle was a clusterfuck of articles demanding empathy for Trump voters , insisting that their rage must have some rational roots - perhaps economic insecurity ?
The persistence of the "economic insecurity" angle in the face of overwhelming evidence against it was a testament to the power of hope over reason.
(The subtext here is usually that if you don't retweet approvingly, you're a racist yourself, and possibly a racist Trump supporter.) There are four reasons why this talking point is false.
... .... ...
"It's not a question of what happens in the last week. The question is that she should have won this election by 10 percentage points.
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Nov 16, 2016 | marknesop.wordpress.com
ucgsblog, November 14, 2016 at 3:50 pmErm, atheist groups are known to target smaller Christian groups with lawsuits. A baker was sued for refusing to bake a cake for a Gay Wedding. She was perfectly willing to serve the couple, just not at the wedding. In California we had a lawsuit over a cross in a park. Atheists threatened a lawsuit over a seal. Look, I get that there are people with no life out there, but why are they bringing the rest of us into their insanity, with constant lawsuits. There's actually a concept known as "Freedom from Religion" – what the heck? Can you imagine someone arguing about "Freedom from Speech" in America? But it's ok to do it to religious folk! And yes, that includes Muslims, who had to fight to build a Mosque in New York. They should've just said it was a Scientology CenterThe "my way" or the highway rhetoric from Clinton supporters on the campaign was sickening. When Bush was called a warmonger for Iraq, that was fine. When Clinton was called a warmonger for Iraq and Libya, the Clintonites went on the offensive, often throwing around crap like "if she was a man, she wouldn't be a warmonger!"
The problem with healthcare in the US deserves its own thread, but Obamacare did not fix it; Obamacare made it worse, especially in the rural communities. The laws in schools are fundamentally retarded. A kid was suspended for giving a friend Advil. Another kid suspended for bringing in a paper gun. I could go on and on. A girl was expelled from college for trying to look gangsta in a L'Oreal mask. How many examples do you need? Look at all of the new "child safety laws" which force kids to leave in a bubble. And when they enter the Real World, they're fucked, so they pick up the drugs. In cities it's crack, in farmvilles it's meth.
Hillary didn't win jack shit. She got a plurality of the popular vote. She didn't win it, since winning implies getting the majority. How many Johnson votes would've gone to Trump if it was based on popular vote, in a safe state? Of course the biggest issue is the attack on the way of life, which is all too real. I encourage you to read this, in order to understand where they're coming from: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/
"Nothing that happens outside the city matters!" they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage. But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters. To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. "Are you assholes listening now?"
On racism: "what I can say, from personal experience, is that the racism of my youth was always one step removed. I never saw a family member, friend, or classmate be mean to the actual black people we had in town. We worked with them, played video games with them, waved to them when they passed. What I did hear was several million comments about how if you ever ventured into the city, winding up in the "wrong neighborhood" meant you'd get dragged from your car, raped, and burned alive. Looking back, I think the idea was that the local minorities were fine as long as they acted exactly like us."
"They're getting the shit kicked out of them. I know, I was there. Step outside of the city, and the suicide rate among young people fucking doubles. The recession pounded rural communities, but all the recovery went to the cities. The rate of new businesses opening in rural areas has utterly collapsed."
^ That, I'd say, is known as destroying their lives. Also this:
"In a city, you can plausibly aspire to start a band, or become an actor, or get a medical degree. You can actually have dreams. In a small town, there may be no venues for performing arts aside from country music bars and churches. There may only be two doctors in town - aspiring to that job means waiting for one of them to retire or die. You open the classifieds and all of the job listings will be for fast food or convenience stores. The "downtown" is just the corpses of mom and pop stores left shattered in Walmart's blast crater, the "suburbs" are trailer parks. There are parts of these towns that look post-apocalyptic.
I'm telling you, the hopelessness eats you alive. And if you dare complain, some liberal elite will pull out their iPad and type up a rant about your racist white privilege. Already, someone has replied to this with a comment saying, "You should try living in a ghetto as a minority!" Exactly. To them, it seems like the plight of poor minorities is only used as a club to bat away white cries for help. Meanwhile, the rate of rural white suicides and overdoses skyrockets. Shit, at least politicians act like they care about the inner cities."
And the rural folk are called a "basket of deplorables" and other names. If you want to fight racism, a battle that is Noble and Honorable, you have to understand the nuances between racism and hopelessness. The wizard-wannabe idiots are a tiny fringe. The "deplorables" are a huge part of rural America. If you alienate them, you're helping the idiots mentioned above.
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Nov 12, 2016 | www.independent.org
...In fact, the entire Democratic Party has mainly ceased to campaign on issues-choosing instead to invest heavily in identity politics. The message to black voters is: vote for us because you are black, not because of anything we are going to do. Ditto for Hispanics. And women. And the LGBT community. And others. Hillary does have an agenda. More on that in a future post. But she didn't campaign on it.
As for the mainstream media, I have never seen an election in which the media was so biased. And not just biased. The media's entire view of the election was Hillary Clinton's view. Even on Fox News, the entire focus on election night and in the days that followed was on identity politics. How many blacks were voting? How many Hispanics? How many women?
As if demography were destiny.
Now, as it turns out, a greater percentage of blacks voted for Trump than voted for Romney. The same thing is true of Hispanics. In fact, Trump did better among minorities than any Republican since Ronald Reagan. He even got a majority of white female votes.
Why were all these people doing something they weren't supposed to do? On network television and even on cable television, no one had an answer.
Putting the media aside for the moment, do you know what Hillary's position is on trade deals with other countries? Of course, you don't. And neither does anyone else. When she spoke about the issue at all, she said one thing behind closed doors and another in public. The reason this doesn't matter on Wall Street (or to the editors of the New York Times ) is that they assume she has no real convictions and that money and special interest influence will always win out.
What about Hillary's solution to the problem of illegal immigration? Do you know what that is? How about her position on corporate tax reform? Or school choice? Or Obamacare? Or opportunities for blacks in inner cities?
I bet you don't know her positions on any of these topics. But I bet you do know Donald Trump's. Not in detail, of course. But I bet you know the general way in which he differs from Obama administration policies.
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Nov 16, 2016 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
mk November 16, 2016 at 7:55 am
Eureka Springs November 16, 2016 at 8:21 amWhere the Democrats went wrong CNBC. Obama: "[O]ne of the issues that Democrats have to be clear on is that given population distribution across the country, we have to compete everywhere, we have to show up everywhere." Throwing Clinton under the bus…
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I yelled at the radio after hearing this, because he means just showing up, telling people what they want to hear, then doing whatever the hell you want after getting elected. Not one word about actually meeting peoples needs. EFF OBAMA and the DEMOCRATIC PARTY!!If you didn't read this (linked yesterday), you should consider both reading and sharing far and wide. The entire system is designed to be anti-representative.
Don't just get/stay mad, quit expecting a bunch of gangsters to function democratically. Get out of their box.
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Altandmain November 15, 2016 at 10:08 amCarla November 15, 2016 at 10:42 amUltimately the Establishment Democrats have nobody but themselves to blame for this one. The only question is whether or not they are willing to take responsibility for what happened.
Judging by the volume of complaints from Clinton sycophants insisting that people did not get behind Clinton or that it was purely her gender, they won't. Why would anyone get behind Clinton save the 1%? Her policies were pro-war, pro-Wall Street, and at odds with what the American people needed. Also, we should judge based on policy, not gender and Clinton comes way short of Sanders in that regard – in many regards, she is the antithesis of Sanders.
Class trumps race, to make a pun. If the left doesn't take the Democratic Party back and clean house, I expect that there is a high probability that 2020's election will look at lot like the 2004 elections.
I'd recommend someone like Sanders to run. Amongst the current crop, maybe Tulsi Gabbard or Nina Turner seem like the best candidates.
Synoia November 15, 2016 at 10:13 am"Establishment Democrats have nobody but themselves to blame for this one. The only question is whether or not they are willing to take responsibility" I disagree. In my view, it is not a question at all. They have never taken responsibility for anything, and they never will.
Lambert Strether November 15, 2016 at 2:22 pmWhat would make Democrats focus on the working class? Nothing. They have lost and brought about destruction of the the Unions, which was the Democratic Base, and have become beholden to the money. The have noting in common with the working class, and no sympathy for their situation, either.
What does Bill Clinton, who drive much of the policy in the '90s, and spent his early years running away form the rural poor in Arkansas (Law School, Rhodes Scholarship), have in common with working class people anywhere?
The same question applies to Hillary, to Trump and the remainder of our "representatives" in Congress.
Without Unions, how are US Representatives from the working class elected?
What we are seeing is a shift in the US for the Republicans to become the populist party. They already have the churches, and with Trump they can gain the working class – although I do not underestimate the contempt help by our elected leaders for the Working Class and poor.
The have forgotten, if they ever believed: "There, but for the grace of God, go I".
Synoia November 15, 2016 at 11:19 pm> What would make Democrats focus on the working class?
The quest for political power.
James Dodd November 15, 2016 at 10:46 amIron law of institutions applies. Position in the D apparatus is more important than political power – because with power come blame.
I notice Obama worked hard to lose majorities in the house and Senate so he could point to the Republicans and say "it was their fault" except when he actually wanted something, and made it happen (such as TPP).
anonymouse November 15, 2016 at 11:07 amWhat So Many People Don't Get About the U.S. Working Class – Harvard Business Review
Brad November 15, 2016 at 11:45 amWe know that class and economic insecurity drove many white people to vote for Trump. That's understandable. And now we are seeing a rise in hate incidents inspired by his victory. So obviously there is a race component in his support as well. So, if you, white person, didn't vote for Trump out of white supremacy, would you consider making a statement that disavows the acts of extremist whites? Do you vow to stand up and help if you see people being victimized? Do you vow not to stay silent when you encounter Trump supporters who ARE obviously in thrall to the white supremacist siren call?
Harold November 15, 2016 at 11:14 amAgreed with the first but not the second. It's typical liberal identity politics guilt tripping. That won't get you too far on the "white side" of Youngstown Ohio.
And I wouldn't worry about it. When I worked at the at the USX Fairless works in Levittown PA in 1988, I was befriended by one steelworker who was a clear raving white supremacist racist. (Actually rather nonchalant about about it). However he was the only one I encountered who was like this, and eventually I figured out that he befriended a "newbie" like me because he had no friends among the other workers, including the whites. He was not popular at all.
Citizen Sissy November 15, 2016 at 11:38 amLeft-wing populism unites people of all classes and all identities by emphasizing policies. That was what Bernie Sanders meant to me, at least.
rd November 15, 2016 at 11:47 amI've always thought that Class, not Race, was the Third Rail of American Politics, and that the US was fast-tracking to a more shiny, happy feudalism.
Also suspect that the working-class, Rust-Belt Trump supporters will soon be thrown under the bus by their Standard Bearer, if the Transition Team appointments are any indicator: e.g. Privateers at SSA.
Gonna get interesting very quickly.
Dave November 15, 2016 at 11:55 amMy wife teaches primary grades in an inner city school. She has made it clear to me over the years that the challenges her children are facing are related to poverty, not race. She sees a big correlation between the financial status of a family and its family structure (one or more parents not present or on drugs) and the kids' success in school. Race is a minor factor.
She also makes it clear to me that the Somali/Syrian/Iraqi etc. immigrant kids are going to do very well even though they come in without a word of English because they are working their butts off and they have the full support of their parents and community. These people left bad places and came to their future and they are determined to grab it with both hands. 40% of her class this year is ENL (English as a non-native language). Since it is an inner city school, they don't have teacher's aides in the class, so it is just one teacher in a class of 26-28 kids, of which a dozen struggle to understand English. Surprisingly, the class typically falls short of the "standards" that the state sets for the standardized exams. Yet many of the immigrant kids end up going to university after high school through sheer effort.
Bullying and extreme misbehavior (teachers are actually getting injured by violent elementary kids) is largely done by kids born in the US. The immigrant kids tend to be fairly well-behaved.
On a side note, the CSA at our local farmer's market said they couldn't find people to pick the last of their fall crops (it is in a rural community so a car is needed to get there). So the food bank was going out this week to pick produce like squash, onions etc. and we were told we could come out and pick what we wanted. Full employment?
shinola November 15, 2016 at 12:13 pm"Women and minorities encouraged to apply" is a Class issue?
Lambert Strether November 15, 2016 at 2:15 pmThe problem with running on a class based platform in America is, well, it's America; and in good ol' America, we are taught that anyone can become a successful squillionare – ya know, hard work, nose-to-the-grindstone, blah, blah, blah.
The rags to riches American success fable is so ingrained that ideas like taxing the rich a bit more fall flat because everyone thinks "that could be me someday. Just a few house flips, a clever new app, that ten-bagger (or winning lottery ticket) and I'm there" ("there" being part of the 1%).
The idea that anyone can be successful (i.e. rich) is constantly promoted.
I think this fantasy is beginning to fade a bit but the "wealth = success" idea is so deeply rooted in the American psyche I don't think it will ever fade completely away.
Vatch November 15, 2016 at 2:19 pmI'm recalling (too lazy to find the link) a poll a couple years ago that showed the number of American's identifying as "working class" increased, and the number as "middle class" decreased.
jrs November 15, 2016 at 6:11 pmHere ya go!
http://www.gallup.com/poll/182918/fewer-americans-identify-middle-class-recent-years.aspx
TarheelDem November 15, 2016 at 12:24 pmeven working class is a total equivocation. A lot of them are service workers period.
armchair November 15, 2016 at 2:50 pmIt is both. And it is a deliberate mechanism of class division to preserve power. Bill Cecil-Fronsman,
Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina identifies nine classes in the class structure of a state that mixed modern capitalist practice (plantations), agrarian YOYO independence (the non-slaveowning subsistence farms), town economies, and subsistence (farm labor). Those classes were typed racially and had certain economic, power, and social relations associated with them. For both credit and wages, few escaped the plantation economy and being subservient to the planter capitalists locally.Moreover, ethnic identity was embedded in the law as a class marker. This system was developed independently or exported through imitation in various ways to the states outside North Carolina and the slave-owning states. The abolition of slavery meant free labor in multiple senses and the capitalist use of ethnic minorities and immigrants as scabs integrated them into an ethnic-class system, where it was broad ethnicity and not just skin-color that defined classes. Other ethnic groups, except Latinos and Muslim adherents, now have earned their "whiteness".
One suspects that every settler colonial society develops this combined ethnic-class structure in which the indigenous ("Indians" in colonial law) occupy one group of classes and imported laborers or slaves or intermixtures ("Indian", "Cape Colored" in South Africa) occupy another group of classes available for employment in production. Once employed, the relationship is exactly that of the slaveowner to the slave no matter how nicely the harsh labor management techniques of 17th century Barbados and Jamaica have been made kinder and gentler. But outside the workplace (and often still inside) the broader class structure applies even contrary to the laws trying to restrict the relationship to boss and worker.
Blacks are not singling themselves out to police; police are shooting unarmed black people without punishment. The race of the cop does not matter, but the institution of impunity makes it open season on a certain class of victims.
It is complicated because every legal and often managerial attempt has been made to reduce the class structure of previous economies to the pure capitalism demanded by current politics.
So when in a post Joe McCarthy, post-Cold War propaganda society, someone wants to protest the domination of capitalism, attacking who they perceive as de facto scabs to their higher incomes (true or not) is the chosen mode of political attack. Not standing up for the political rights of the victims of ethnically-marked violence and discrimination allows the future depression of wages and salaries by their selective use as a threat in firms. And at the individual firm and interpersonal level even this gets complicated because in spite of the pressure to just be businesslike, people do still care for each other.
This is a perennial mistake. In the 1930s Southern Textile Strike, some organizing was of both black and white workers; the unions outside the South rarely stood in solidarity with those efforts because they were excluding ethnic minorities from their unions; indeed, some locals were organized by ethnicity. That attitude also carried over to solidarity with white workers in the textile mills. And those white workers who went out on a limb to organize a union never forgot that failure in their labor struggle. It is the former textile areas of the South that are most into Trump's politics and not so much the now minority-majority plantation areas.
It still is race in the inner ring suburbs of ethnically diverse cities like St. Louis that hold the political lock on a lot of states. Because Ferguson to them seems like an invasion of the lower class. Class politics, of cultural status, based on ethnicity. Still called by that 19h century scientific racism terminology that now has been debunked - race - Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid. Indigenous, at least in the Americas, got stuck under Mongoloid.
You go organize the black, Latino, and white working class to form unions and gain power, and it will happen. It is why Smithfield Foods in North Carolina had to negotiate a contract. Race can be transcended in action.
Pretending the ethnic discrimination and even segregation does not exist and have its own problems is political suicide in the emerging demographics. Might not be a majority, but it is an important segment of the vote. Which is why the GOP suppressed minority voters through a variety of legal and shady electoral techniques. Why Trump wants to deport up to 12 million potential US citizens and some millions of already birthright minor citizens. And why we are likely to see the National Labor Review Board gutted of what little power it retains from 70 years of attack. Interesting what the now celebrated white working class was not offered in this election, likely because they would vote it down quicker because, you know, socialism.
barrisj November 15, 2016 at 12:49 pmYour comment reminded me of an episode in Seattle's history. Link . The unions realized they were getting beat in their strikes, by scabs, who were black. The trick was for the unions to bring the blacks into the union. This was a breakthrough, and it worked in Seattle, in 1934. There is a cool mural the union commissioned by, Pablo O'Higgins , to celebrate the accomplishment.
Waldenpond November 15, 2016 at 1:25 pmSpeaking of class, and class contempt , one must recall the infamous screed published by National Review columnist Kevin Williamson early this year, writing about marginalised white people here is a choice excerpt:
If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy - which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog - you will come to an awful realization. It wasn't Beijing. It wasn't even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn't immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn't any of that.
Nothing happened to them. There wasn't some awful disaster. There wasn't a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence - and the incomprehensible malice - of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain't what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump's speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.
http://crasstalk.com/2016/03/poor-white-america-deserves-to-die-says-national-review/
Now it's not too much of a stretch of the imagination to state that Williamson's animus can be replicated amongst many of the moneyed elite currently pushing and shoving their way into a position within the incoming Trump Administration. The Trump campaign has openly and cynically courted and won the votes of white people similar to those mentioned in Williamson's article, and who – doubtlessly – will be stiffed by policies vigourously opposed to their welfare that will be enacted during the Trump years. The truly intriguing aspect of the Trump election is: what will be the consequences of further degradation of the "lower orders' " quality of life by such actions? Wholesale retreat from electoral politics? Further embitterment and anger NOT toward those in Washington responsible for their lot but directed against ethnic and racial minorities "stealing their jawbs" and "getting welfare while we scrounge for a living"? I sincerely doubt whether the current or a reconstructed Democratic Party can at all rally this large chunk of white America by posing as their "champions" the class divide in the US is as profound as the racial chasm, and neither major party – because of internal contradictions – can offer a credible answer.
barrisj November 15, 2016 at 1:41 pm[In addition to the growing inequality and concomitant wage stagnation for the middle and working classes, 9/11 and its aftermath has certainly has contributed to it as well, as, making PEOPLE LONG FOR the the Golden Age of Managerial Capitalism of the post-WWII era,]
Oh yeah, I noticed a big ol' hankerin' for that from the electorate. What definition could the author be using for Managerial Capitalism that could make it the opposite of inequality? The fight for power between administration and shareholders does not lead to equality for workers.
[So this gave force to the idea that the government was nothing but a viper's nest full of crony capitalist enablers,]
I don't think it's an 'idea' that the govt is crony capitalists and enablers. Ds need to get away from emotive descriptions. Being under/unemployed, houseless, homeless, unable to pay for rent, utilities, food . aren't feelings/ideas. When that type of language is used, it comes across as hand waving. There needs to be a shift of talking to rather than talking about.
If crony capitalism is an idea, it's simply a matter for Ds to identify a group (workers), create a hierarchy (elite!) and come up with a propaganda campaign (celebrities and musicians spending time in flyover country-think hanging out in coffee shops in a flannel shirt) to get votes. Promise to toss them a couple of crumbs with transfer payments (retraining!) or a couple of regulations (mandatory 3 week severance!) and bring out the obligatory D fall back- it would be better than the Rs would give them. On the other hand, if it's factual, the cronies need to be stripped of power and kicked out or the nature of the capitalist structure needs to be changed. It's laughable to imagine liberals or progressives would be open to changing the power and nature of the corporate charter (it makes me smile to think of the gasps).
The author admits that politicians lie and continue the march to the right yet uses the ACA, a march to the right, as a connection to Obama's (bombing, spying, shrinking middle class) likability.
[[But emphasizing class-based policies, rather than gender or race-based solutions, will achieve more for the broad swathe of voters, who comprehensively rejected the "neo-liberal lite" identity politics]
Oops. I got a little lost with the neo-liberal lite identity politics. Financialized identity politics? Privatized identity politics?
I believe women and poc have lost ground (economic and rights) so I would like examples of successful gender and race-based (liberal identity politics) solutions that would demonstrate that identity politics targeting is going to work on the working class.
If workers have lost power, to balance that structure, you give workers more power (I predict that will fail as unions fall under the generic definition of corporatist and the power does not rest with the members but with the CEOs of the unions – an example is a union that block the members from voting to endorse a candidate, go against the member preference and endorse the corporatist candidate), or you remove power from the corporation. Libs/progs can't merely propose something like vesting more power with shareholders to remove executives as an ameliorating maneuver which fails to address the power imbalance.
[This is likely only to accelerate the disintegration of the political system and economic system until the elephant in the room – class – is honestly and comprehensively addressed.]
Enquiring Mind November 15, 2016 at 5:56 pmFor a thorough exposition of lower-class white America from the inception of the Republic to today, a must-read is Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America . Poor or Poorer whites have been demonised since the founding of the original Colonies, and were continuously pushed west to the frontiers by the ruling elites of New England and the South as a way of ridding themselves of "undesirables", who were then left to their own resources, and clung together for mutual assistance.
Thus became the economic and cultural subset of "crackers", "hillbillies", "rednecks", and later, "Okies", a source of contempt and scorn by more economically and culturally endowed whites. The anti-bellum white Southern aristocracy cynically used poor whites as cheap tenant farming, all the while laying down race-based distinctions between them and black slaves – there is always someone lower on the totem pole, and that distinction remains in place today. Post-Reconstruction, the South maintained the cult of white superiority, all the while preserving the status of upper-class whites, and, by race-based public policies, assured lower-class whites that such "superiority" would be maintained by denying the black populations access to education, commerce, the vote, etc. And today, "white trash", or "trailer trash", or poorer whites in general are ubiquitous and as American as apple pie, in the North, the Midwest, and the West, not just the South. Let me quote Isenberg's final paragraph of her book:
White trash is a central, if disturbing, thread in our national narrative. The very existence of such people – both in their visibility and invisibility – is proof that American society obsesses over the mutable labels we give to the neighbors we wish not to notice. "They are not who we are". But they are who we are and have been a fundamental part of our history, whether we like it or not".
vegeholic November 15, 2016 at 2:04 pmAlso read Albion's Seed for interesting discussion about the waves of immigration and how those went on to impact subsequent generations.
ChrisAtRU November 15, 2016 at 2:26 pmPresenting a plan for the future, which has a chance to be supported by the electorate, must start with scrupulous, unwavering honesty and a willingness to acknowledge inconvenient facts. The missing topic from the 2016 campaigns was declining energy surpluses and their pervasive, negative impact on the prosperity to which we feel entitled. Because of the energy cost of producing oil, a barrel today represents a declining fraction of a barrel in terms of net energy. This is the major factor in sluggish economic performance. Failing to make this case and, at the same time, offering glib and vacuous promises of growth and economic revival, are just cynical exercises in pandering.
Our only option is to mange the coming decline in a way that does not descend into chaos and anarchy. This can only be done with a clear vision of causes and effects and the wisdom and courage to accept facts. The alternative is yet more delusions and wishful thinking, whose shelf life is getting shorter.
TG November 15, 2016 at 3:00 pmMarshall is awesome.
To be fair to the article, Marshall did in fact say:
"To be sure, Donald Trump did make a strong appeal to racists, homophobes, and misogynists "
IMO the point Marshall is making that race was not the primary reason #DJT won. And I concur.
This is borne out by the vote tallies which show that the number of R voters from 2012 to 2016 was pretty much on the level (final counts pending):
2016 R Vote: 60,925,616
2012 R Vote: 60,934,407
(Source: US Election Atlas )Stop and think about this for a minute. Every hard core racist had their guy this time around; and yet, the R's could barely muster the same amount of votes as Mittens in 2012. This is huge, and supports the case that other things contributed far more than just race.
Class played in several ways:
Indifference/apathy/fatigue: Lambert posted some data from Carl Beijer on this yesterday in his Clinton Myths piece yesterday.
Anger: #HRC could not convince many people who voted for Bernie that she was interested in his outreach to the working class. More importantly, #HRC could not convince working class white women that she had anything other than her gender and Trump's boorishness as a counterpoint to offer.
Outsider v Insider: Working class people skeptical of political insiders rejected #HRC.pretzelattack November 16, 2016 at 3:09 amKudos. Well said.
If black workers were losing ground and white workers were gaining, one could indeed claim that racism is a problem. However, both black and white workers are losing ground – racism simply cannot be the major issue here. It's not racism, it's class war.
The fixation on race, the corporate funding of screaming 'black lives matter' agitators, the crude attempts to tie Donald Trump to the KKK (really? really?) are just divide and conquer, all over again.
Whatever his other faults, Donald Trump has been vigorous in trying to reach out to working class blacks, even though he knew he wouldn't get much of their vote and he knew that the media mostly would not cover it. Last I heard, he was continuing to try and reach out, despite the black 'leadership' class demanding that he is a racist. Because as was so well pointed out here, the one thing the super-rich fear is a united working class.
Divide and conquer. It's an old trick, but a powerful one.
Suggestion: if (and it's a big if) Trump really does enact policies that help working class blacks, and the Republicans peel away a significant fraction of the black vote, that would set the elites' hair on fire. Because it would mean that the black vote would be in play, and the Neoliberal Democrats couldn't just take their votes for granted. And wouldn't that be a thing.
tongorad November 15, 2016 at 3:18 pmthat was good for 2016. I will look to see if he has stats for other years. i certainly agree that poor whites are more likely to be shot; executions of homeless people by police are one example. the kind of system that was imposed on the people of ferguson has often been imposed on poor whites, too. i do object to the characterization of black lives matter protestors as "screaming agitators"; that's all too reminiscent of the meme of "outside agitators" riling up the local peaceful black people to stand up for their rights that was characteristically used to smear the civil rights movement in the 60's.
Sound of the Suburbs November 15, 2016 at 5:02 pmI might not have much in common at all with certain minorities, but it's highly likely that we share class status.
That's why the status quo allows identity politics and suppresses class politics.Sound of the Suburbs November 15, 2016 at 5:33 pmHaving been around for sometime, I often wonder what The Guardian is going on about in the UK as it is supposed to be our left wing broadsheet.
It isn't a left I even recognised, what was it?
I do read it to try and find out what nonsense it is these people think.
Having been confused for many a year, I think I have just understood this identity based politics as it is about to disappear.
I now think it was a cunning ploy to split the electorate in a different way, to leave the UK working class with no political outlet.
Being more traditional left I often commented on our privately educated elite and private schools but the Guardian readership were firmly in favour of them.
How is this left?
Thank god this is now failing, get back to the old left, the working class and those lower down the scale.
It was clever while it lasted in enabling neoliberalism and a neglect of the working class, but clever in a cunning, nasty and underhand way.
giovanni zibordi November 15, 2016 at 5:56 pmThinking about it, so many of these recent elections have been nearly 50% / 50% splits, has there been a careful analysis of who neoliberalism disadvantages and what minorities need to be bought into the fold to make it work in a democracy.
Women are not a minority, but obviously that is a big chunk if you can get them under your wing. The black vote is another big group when split away and so on.
Brexit nearly 50/50; Austria nearly 50/50; US election nearly 50/50.
dk November 15, 2016 at 7:54 pmSo, 85% of Blacks vote Hillary against Sanders (left) and 92% vote Hillary against Trump (right), but is no race. It's the class issue that sends them to the Clintons. Kindly explain how.
Erelis November 15, 2016 at 10:59 pmObama is personally likeable
Funny think about likeability, likeable people can be real sh*ts. So I started looking into hanging out with less likeable people. I found that they can be considerably more appreciative of friendship and loyalty, maybe because they don't have such easy access to it.
Entertainment media has cautiously explored some aspect so fthis, but in politics, "nice" is still disproportionately values, and not appreciated as a possible flag.
Gaylord November 15, 2016 at 11:24 pmWatch out buddy. They are onto you. I have seen some comments on democratic party sites claiming the use of class to explain Hillary's loss is racist. The democratic party is a goner. History tells us the party establishment will move further right after election losses. And among the activist class there are identity purity battles going on.
different clue November 16, 2016 at 3:47 amWatch as this happens yet again: "In most elections, U.S. politicians of both parties pretend to be concerned about their issues, then conveniently ignore them when they reach power and implement policies from the same Washington Consensus that has dominated the past 40 years." That is why we need a strong third party, a reformed election system with public support of campaigns and no private money, and free and fair media coverage. But it ain't gonna happen.
Well it certainly won't happen by itself. People are going to have to make it happen. Here in Michigan we have a tiny new party called Working Class Party running 3 people here and there. I voted for two of them. If the Democrats run somebody no worse than Trump next time, I will be free to vote Working Class Party to see what happens.
Obviously, if the Democrats nominate yet another Clintonite Obamacrat all over again, I may have to vote for Trump all over again . . . to stop the next Clintonite before it kills again.
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Nov 14, 2016 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com
You can fool all of the people, some of the time. You can fool some of the people all of the time- but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."There are two theories of prosperity and of well-being: The first theory is that if we make the rich richer, somehow they will let a part of their prosperity trickle down to the rest of us. The second theory - and I suppose this goes back to the days of Noah - I won't say Adam and Eve, because they had a less complicated situation - but, at least, back in the days of the flood, there was the theory that if we make the average of mankind comfortable and secure, their prosperity will rise upward, just as yeast rises up, through the ranks...We so easily forget. Once the cry of so-called prosperity is heard in the land, we all become so stampeded by the spirit of the god Mammon, that we cannot serve the dictates of social conscience. . . . We are here to serve notice that the economic order is the invention of man; and that it cannot dominate certain eternal principles of justice and of God...
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Here is Youtube video ( Nov 2, 2016 )
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Nov 15, 2016 | www.unz.com
Michele Paccione / Shutterstock.com Universally, Trump was depicted as an anti-establishment candidate. Washington and Wall Street hated him, and the media were deployed to vilify him endlessly. If they could not discredit Trump enough, surely they would steal the election from him. Some even suggested Trump would be assassinated.Acting the part, Trump charged repeatedly that the election was rigged, and he was right, of course. During the primaries, Hillary Clinton received debate questions in advance from CNN. More seriously, 30 states used voting machines that could easily be hacked.
A leaked tape of Trump making obscene comments about groping women became further proof that the establishment was out to get him. In spite of all this, Trump managed to win by a landslide, so what happened?
To steal an American election, one only needs to tamper with votes in two or three critical states, and since Hillary didn't win, we must conclude that she was never the establishment's chosen puppet. As Trump claimed, the fix was in, all right, except that it was rigged in his favor, as born out by the fact.
While everybody else yelped that Trump would never be allowed to win, I begged to differ. After the Orlando false flag shooting on June 12th, 2016, I wrote:
In 2008, Obama was touted as a political outsider who will hose away all of the rot and bloody criminality of the Bush years. He turned out to be a deft move by our ruling class. Though fools still refuse to see it, Obama is a perfect servant of our military banking complex. Now, Trump is being trumpeted as another political outsider.
A Trump presidency will temporarily appease restless, lower class whites, while serving as a magnet for liberal anger. This will buy our ruling class time as they continue to wage war abroad while impoverishing Americans back home. Like Obama, Trump won't fulfill any of his election promises, and this, too, will be blamed on bipartisan politics.
On September 24th, I doubled down:
Mind-fucked, most Americans can't even see that an American president's only task is to disguise the deep state's intentions. Chosen by the deep state to explain away its crimes, our president's pronouncements are nearly always contradicted by the deep state's actions. While the president talks of peace, democracy, racial harmony, prosperity for Main Street and going after banksters, etc., the deep state wages endless war, stages meaningless elections, stokes racial hatred, bankrupts nearly all Americans and enables massive Wall Street crimes, etc.
Only the infantile will imagine the president as any kind of savior or, even more hilariously, anti-establishment. Since the deep state won't even tolerate a renegade reporter at, say, the San Jose Mercury News, how can you expect a deep state's enemy to land in the White House?! It cannot happen.
A presidential candidate will promise to fix all that's wrong with our government, and this stance, this appearance, is actually very useful for the deep state, for it gives Americans hope. Promising everything, Obama delivered nothing. So who do you think is being primed by the deep state to be our next false savior?
Who benefits from false flag terrorist attacks blamed on Muslims? Who gains when blacks riot? Why is the Democratic Party propping up a deeply-despised and terminally ill war criminal? More personable Bernie Sanders was nixed by the deep state since it had another jester in mind.
The first presidential debate is Monday. Under stress, Hillary's eyes will dart in separate directions. Coughing nonstop for 90 minutes, her highness will hack up a gazillion unsecured emails. Her head will jerk spasmodically, plop onto the floor and, though decapitated, continue to gush platitudes and lies. "A Very Impressive Performance," CNBC and CNN will announce. Come November, though, Trump will be installed because his constituency needs to be temporarily pacified. The deep state knows that white people are pissed.
The media were out to get Trump, pundits from across the political spectrum kept repeating, but the truth is that the media made Trump. Long before the election, Trump became a household name, thanks to the media.
Your average American can't name any other real estate developer, casino owner or even his own senators, but he has known Trump since forever. For more than a decade, Trump was a reality TV star, with two of his children also featured regularly on The Apprentice. Trump's "You're fired" and his hair became iconic. Trump appeared on talk shows, had cameo roles in movies and owned the Miss Universe pageant. In 2011, Obama joked that Trump as president would deck out the White House in garish fashion, with his own name huge on the façade. The suave, slick prez roasted Trump again in 2016. Trump has constantly been in the limelight.
It's true that during the presidential campaign, Trump received mostly negative press, but this only ramped up support among his core constituency. Joe Sixpacks had long seen the media as not just against everything they cherished, but against them as people, so the more the media attacked Trump, the more popular he became among the white working class.
Like politicians, casinos specialize in empty promises. Trump, then, is a master hustler, just like Obama, and with help from the media, this New York billionaire became a darling of the flyover states. Before his sudden transformation, Trump was certainly an insider. He donated $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation, and Bill and Hillary attended his third wedding. Golf buddies, The Donald and Bill were also friends with one Jeffrey Epstein, owner of the infamous Lolita Express and a sex orgy, sex slave island in the Caribbean.
In 2002, New York Magazine published "Jeffrey Epstein: International Money of Mystery." This asskissing piece begins, "He comes with cash to burn, a fleet of airplanes, and a keen eye for the ladies-to say nothing of a relentless brain that challenges Nobel Prize-winning scientists across the country-and for financial markets around the world."
Trump is quoted, "I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it-Jeffrey enjoys his social life."
Bill Clinton shouts out, "Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science. I especially appreciated his insights and generosity during the recent trip to Africa to work on democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating HIV/AIDS."
Epstein gushes back, "If you were a boxer at the downtown gymnasium at 14th Street and Mike Tyson walked in, your face would have the same look as these foreign leaders had when Clinton entered the room. He is the world's greatest politician."
Even during a very nasty election campaign, Trump stayed clear of Clinton's association with Epstein because he himself had been chummy with the convicted pervert. Trump also never brought up the Clintons' drug running in Mena or the many mysterious deaths of those whose existence inconvenienced their hold on power.
With eight years in the White House, plus stints as a senator then secretary of state, Clinton is considered the ultimate insider. Though a novice politician, Trump is also an insider, and it's a grand joke of the establishment that they've managed to convince Joe Sixpacks everywhere that Trump will save them.
Knowing how angry the working class has become, the deep state could not install Hillary, for that would have been a tiresome rehash of another Clinton presidency. With NAFTA, Bill launched the job offshoring that has wrecked this country, and those most affected by it, working class whites, know damn well who's responsible. The Clinton brand has become anathema to middle America.
While Clinton says America is already great, Trump promises to make America great again, but the decline of the US will only accelerate. Our manufacturing base is handicapped because American workers will not put up with Chinese wages, insanely long hours or living in cramped factory dormitories. In a global economy, those who can suck it up best get the jobs.
On the foreign front, America's belligerence will not ease up under a Trump presidency, for without a hyper kinetic military to browbeat and bomb, the world will stop lending us money. The US doesn't just wage wars to fatten the military banking complex, but to prop up the US Dollar and prevent our economy from collapsing. The empire yields tangible benefits for even the lowliest Americans.
With his livelihood vaporized, the poor man does not care for LGBT rights, the glass ceiling or climate change. Supplementing his wretched income with frequent treks to the church pantry, if not blood bank, he needs immediate relief. It's a shame he's staking his hopes on an imposter.
The deep state ushered in Trump because he's clearly their most useful decoy. As the country hopes in vain, the crooked men behind the curtain will go on with business as usual. Trump is simply an Obama for a different demographic. Nothing will change for the better.
Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate . He's tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, Postcards from the End of America .
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Nov 15, 2016 | www.counterpunch.org
In the week leading up to last Tuesday's election the press was busy writing obituaries for the Republican Party. This continued even after Donald Trump's "surprising" victory – which, like the 2008 bank-fraud crash, "nobody could have expected." The pretense is that Trump saw what no other politician saw: that the economy has not recovered since 2008.Democrats still seem amazed that voters are more concerned about economic conditions and resentment against Wall Street (no bankers jailed, few junk mortgages written down). It is a sign of their wrong path that party strategists are holding onto the same identity politics they have used since the 1960s to divide Americans into hyphenated special-interest groups.
Obviously, the bottom 95 Percent realize that their incomes and net worth have declined, not recovered. National Income and Federal Reserve statistics show that all growth has accrued to just 5 percent of the population. Hillary is said to have spent $1 billion on polling, TV advertising and high-salaried staff members, but managed not to foresee the political reaction to this polarization. She and her coterie ignored economic policy as soon as Bernie was shoved out of the way and his followers all but told to join a third party. Her campaign speech tried to convince voters that they were better off than they were eight years ago. They knew better!
So the question now is whether Donald Trump will really a maverick and shake up the Republican Party. There seems to be a fight going on for Donald's soul – or at least the personnel he appoints to his cabinet. Thursday and Friday saw corporate lobbyists in the Republican leadership love-bombing him like the Moonies or Hari Krishna cults welcoming a new potential recruit. Will he simply surrender now and pass on the real work of government to the Republican apparatchiks?
The stock market thinks so! On Wednesday it soared almost by 300 points, and repeated this gain on Thursday, setting a DJIA record! Pharmaceuticals are way up, as higher drug prices loom for Medicaid and Medicare. Stocks of the pipelines and major environmental polluters are soaring, from oil and gas to coal, mining and forestry, expecting U.S. environmental leadership to be as dead under Trump as it was under Obama and his push for the TPP and TTIP (with its fines for any government daring to impose standards that cost these companies money). On the bright side, these "trade" agreements to enable corporations to block public laws protecting the environment, consumers and society at large are now presumably dead.
For now, personalities are policy. A problem with this is that anyone who runs for president is in it partly for applause. That was Carter's weak point, leading him to cave into Democratic apparatchiks in 1974. It looks like Trump may be a similar susceptibility. He wants to be loved, and the Republican lobbyists are offering plenty of applause if only he will turn to them and break his campaign promises in the way that Obama did in 2008. It would undo his hope to be a great president and champion of the working class that was his image leading up to November 8.
The fight for the Democratic Party's future (dare I say "soul"?)
In her Wednesday morning post mortem speech, Hillary made a bizarre request for young people (especially young women) to become politically active as Democrats after her own model. What made this so strange is that the Democratic National Committee has done everything it can to discourage millennials from running. There are few young candidates – except for corporate and Wall Street Republicans running as Blue Dog Democrats. The left has not been welcome in the party for a decade – unless it confines itself only to rhetoric and demagogy, not actual content. For Hillary's DNC coterie the problem with millennials is that they are not shills for Wall Street. The treatment of Bernie Sanders is exemplary. The DNC threw down the gauntlet.
Instead of a love fest within the Democratic Party's ranks, the blame game is burning. The Democrats raised a reported $182 million dollars running up to the election. But when democratic candidates from Russ Feingold in Wisconsin and other candidates in Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania asked for help. Hillary monopolized it all for TV ads, leaving these candidates in the lurch. The election seemed to be all about her, about personality and identity politics, not about the economic issues paramount in most voters' minds.
Six months ago the polls showed her $1 billion spent on data polling, TV ads and immense staff of sycophants to have been a vast exercise in GIGO. From May to June the Democratic National Committee (DNC) saw polls showing Bernie Sanders beating Trump, but Hillary losing. Did the Democratic leadership really prefer to lose with Hillary than win behind him and his social democratic reformers.
Hillary doesn't learn. Over the weekend she claimed that her analysis showed that FBI director Comey's reports "rais[ing] doubts that were groundless, baseless," stopped her momentum. This was on a par with the New York Times analysis that had showed her with an 84 percent probability of winning last Tuesday. She still hasn't admitted that here analysis was inaccurate.
What is the Democratic Party's former constituency of labor and progressive reformers to do? Are they to stand by and let the party be captured in Hillary's wake by Robert Rubin's Goldman Sachs-Citigroup gang that backed her and Obama?
If the party is to be recaptured, now is the moment to move. The 2016 election sounded the death knell for the identity politics. Its aim was to persuade voters not to think of their identity in economic terms, but to think of themselves as women or as racial and ethnic groups first and foremost, not as having common economic interests. This strategy to distract voters from economic policies has obviously failed.
It did not work with women. In Florida, only 51 percent of white women are estimated to have voted for Hillary. It didn't even work very well in ethnic Hispanic precincts. They too were more concerned about their own job opportunities.
The ethnic card did work with many black voters (although not so strongly; fewer blacks voted for Hillary than had showed up for Obama). Under the Obama administration for the past eight years, blacks have done worse in terms of income and net worth than any other grouping, according to the Federal Reserve Board's statistics. But black voters were distracted from their economic interests by the Democrats' ethnic-identity politics.
This election showed that voters have a sense of when they're being lied to. After eight years of Obama's demagogy, pretending to support the people but delivering his constituency to his financial backers on Wall Street. "Identity politics" has given way to the stronger force of economic distress. Mobilizing identity politics behind a Wall Street program will no longer work.
If we are indeed experiencing a revival of economic class consciousness, who should lead the fight to clean up the Democratic Party Wall Street leadership? Will it be the Wall Street wing, or can Bernie and perhaps Elizabeth Warren make their move?
There is only one way to rescue the Democrats from the Clintons and Rubin's gang. That is to save the Democratic Party from being tarred irreversibly as the party of Wall Street and neocon brinkmanship. It is necessary to tell the Clintons and the Rubin gang from Wall Street to leave now . And take Evan Bayh with them.
The danger of not taking this opportunity to clean out the party now
The Democratic Party can save itself only by focusing on economic issues – in a way that reverses its neoliberal stance under Obama, and indeed going back to Bill Clinton's pro-Wall Street administration. The Democrats need to do what Britain's Labour Party did by cleaning out Tony Blair's Thatcherites. As Paul Craig Roberts wrote over the weekend: "Change cannot occur if the displaced ruling class is left intact after a revolution against them. We have proof of this throughout South America. Every revolution by the indigenous people has left unmolested the Spanish ruling class, and every revolution has been overthrown by collusion between the ruling class and Washington." [1] Otherwise the Democrats will be left as an empty shell.
Now is the time for Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and the few other progressives who have not been kept out of office by the DNC to make their move and appointing their own nominees to the DNC. If they fail, the Democratic Party is dead.
An indication of how hard the present Democratic Party leadership will fight against this change of allegiance is reflected in their long fight against Bernie Sanders and other progressives going back to Dennis Kucinich. The past five days of MoveOn demonstrations sponsored by Hillary's backer George Soros may be an attempt to preempt the expected push by Bernie's supporters, by backing Howard Dean for head of the DNC while organizing groups to be called on for what may be an American "Maidan Spring."
Perhaps some leading Democrats preferred to lose with their Wall Street candidate Hillary than win with a reformer who would have edged them out of their right-wing positions. But the main problem was hubris. Hillary's coterie thought they could make their own reality. They believed that hundreds of millions of dollars of TV and other advertising could sway voters. But eight years of Obama's rescue of Wall Street instead of the economy was enough for most voters to see how deceptive his promises had been. And they distrusted Hillary's pretended embrace of Bernie's opposition to TPP.
The Rust Belt swing states that shifted away from backing Obama for the last two terms are not racist states. They voted for Obama twice, after all. But seeing his support Wall Street, they had lost faith in her credibility – and were won by Bernie in his primaries against Hillary.
Donald Trump is thus Obama's legacy. Last week's vote was a backlash. Hillary thought that getting Barack and Michelle Obama to campaign as her surrogates would help, but it turned out to be the kiss of death. Obama egged her on by urging voters to "save his legacy" by supporting her as his Third Term. But voters did not want his legacy of giveaways to the banks, the pharmaceutical and health-insurance monopolies.
Most of all, it was Hillary's asking voters to ignore her economic loyalty to Wall Street simply to elect a woman, and her McCarthy-like accusations that Trump was "Putin's candidate" (duly echoed by Paul Krugman). On Wednesday, Obama's former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul tweeted that "Putin intervened in our elections and succeeded." It was as if the Republicans and even the FBI were a kind of fifth column for the KGB. Her receptiveness to cutting back Social Security and steering wage withholding into the stock market did not help – especially her hedge fund campaign contributors. Compulsory health-insurance fees continue to rise for healthy young people rise as the main profit center that Obamacare has offered the health-insurance monopoly.
The anti-Trump rallies mobilized by George Soros and MoveOn look like a preemptive attempt to capture the potential socialist left for the old Clinton divide-and-conquer strategy. The group was defeated five years ago when it tried to capture Occupy Wall Street to make it part of the Democratic Party. It's attempt to make a comeback right now should be heard as an urgent call to Bernie's supporters and other "real" Democrats that they need to create an alternative pretty quickly so as not to let "socialism" be captured by the Soros and his apparatchiks carried over from the Clinton campaign.
Notes.
[1] Paul Craig Roberts, "The Anti-Trump Protesters Are Tools of the Oligarchy," November 11, 2016.
Michael Hudson's new book, Killing the Host is published in e-format by CounterPunch Books and in print by Islet . He can be reached via his website, [email protected]
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Nov 15, 2016 | crookedtimber.org
likbez 11.15.16 at 6:09 pm 124
@115
Liberal democracy has always depended on its relationships with an illiberal Other of one sort or another, and all too often "liberal progressivism" merely means responding to such relationships in one's own society, the capitalist exploitation of a domestic proletariat, by "outsourcing" our illiberal tendencies to consist largely of the imperial domination and subjugation of foreigners.
(Which can even happen inside one's own borders, as long as it remains suitably "illegal"; notice how much less ideologically problematic it is to document the presence and labor of the most brutally exploited migrant workers in e.g. China or the Gulf Arab states than in more liberal societies like the US or EU.)
It's the height of either hypocrisy or obliviousness for those who consider themselves liberal progressives to then act surprised when the people charged with carrying out this domination and subjugation on our behalf - our Colonel Jessups, if you will - demand that we stop hiding our society's illiberal underbelly and acknowledge/celebrate it for what it is , a demand that may be the single most authentic marker of the transition from liberalism to fascism.
In Pareto "elite rotation" terms, the election of Trump definitely means rotation of the US neoliberal elite. "Status quo" faction of the elite was defeated due to backlash over globalization and disappearance of meaningful well-paid jobs, with mass replacement of them by McJobs and temps/contractors.
Whether openness about domination and subjugation is an "authentic marker of the transition from [neo]liberalism to fascism" remains to be seen, unless we assume that this transition (to the National Security State) already happened long ego.
In a way illegal immigrants in the USA already represented stable and growing "new slaves" class for decades. Their existence and contribution to the US economy was never denied or suppressed. And even Greenspan acknowledged that Iraq war was about oil. So Trump put nothing new on the table other then being slightly more blunt.
likbez 11.15.16 at 7:19 pm 125
@120
bob mcmanus 11.15.16 at 4:31 pm
Neoliberalism and neo-imperialism show pretty much the contradictions of the older globalist orders (late 19th c), they are just now distributed so as re-intensify the differences, the combined etc, and concentrate the accumulation.
And elites are fighting over the spoils.
Yes, neoliberalism and neo-imperialism are much better and more precise terms, then fuzzy notions like "liberal progressivism" . May be we should use Occam razor and discard the term "[neo]liberal progressivism". The term "soft neoliberals" is IMHO good enough description of the same.
As for contradictions of the "older globalist orders (late 19th c)" the key difference is that under neoliberalism armies play the role of "can opener" and after then the direct occupation were by-and-large replaced with financial institutions and with indirect "debt slavery". In many cases neoliberal subjugation is achieved via color revolution mechanism, without direct military force involved.
Neo-colonialism creates higher level of concentration of risks due to the greed of financial elite which was demonstrated in full glory in 2008. As such it looks less stable then old colonialism. And it generates stronger backlash, which typically has elements of anti-Americanism, as we see in Philippines now. Merkel days might also be numbered.
Also TBTF banks are now above the law as imposing judgments on them after the crisis can have disastrous economic externalities. At the same time the corruption of regulators via revolving door mechanisms blocks implementing meaningful preventive regulatory reforms.
In other words, like with Soviet nomenklatura, with the neoliberal elite we see the impossibility of basic change, either toward taming the TBTF or toward modification of an aggressive neocolonial foreign policy with its rampant militarism.
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Nov 14, 2016 | www.wsws.org
The elections saw a massive shift in party support among the poorest and wealthiest voters. The share of votes for the Republicans amongst the most impoverished section of workers, those with family incomes under $30,000, increased by 10 percentage points from 2012. In several key Midwestern states, the swing of the poorest voters toward Trump was even larger: Wisconsin (17-point swing), Iowa (20 points), Indiana (19 points) and Pennsylvania (18 points).The swing to Republicans among the $30,000 to $50,000 family income range was 6 percentage points. Those with incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 swung away from the Republicans compared to 2012 by 2 points.
The affluent and rich voted for Clinton by a much broader margin than they had voted for the Democratic candidate in 2012. Among those with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000, Clinton benefited from a 9-point Democratic swing. Voters with family incomes above $250,000 swung toward Clinton by 11 percentage points. The number of Democratic voters amongst the wealthiest voting block increased from 2.16 million in 2012 to 3.46 million in 2016-a jump of 60 percent.
Clinton was unable to make up for the vote decline among women (2.1 million), African Americans (3.2 million), and youth (1.2 million), who came overwhelmingly from the poor and working class, with the increase among the rich (1.3 million).
Clinton's electoral defeat is bound up with the nature of the Democratic Party, an alliance of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus with privileged sections of the upper-middle class based on the politics of race, gender and sexual orientation.
Over the course of the last forty years, the Democratic Party has abandoned all pretenses of social reform, a process escalated under Obama. Working with the Republican Party and the trade unions, it is responsible for enacting social policies that have impoverished vast sections of the working class, regardless of race or gender.
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crookedtimber.org
likbez 11.15.16 at 1:19 am 93
Salazar 11.14.16 at 12:11 am #18
> How is the American Empire in decline? And how do we measure its decline?We can only speculate about signs of decline. From WaTimes ( http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/29/cal-thomas-america-shows-decline-signs-of-empires-/ )British diplomat John Glubb wrote a book called "The Fate of Empires and Search For Survival." Glubb noted that the average age of empires since the time of ancient Assyria (859-612 B.C.) is 250 years. Only the Mameluke Empire in Egypt and the Levant (1250-1517) made it as far as 267 years. America is 238 years old and is exhibiting signs of decline. All empires begin, writes Glubb, with the age of pioneers, followed by ages of conquest, commerce, affluence, intellect and decadence. America appears to have reached the age of decadence, which Glubb defines as marked by "defensiveness, pessimism, materialism, frivolity, an influx of foreigners, the welfare state, [and] a weakening of religion."The most important is probably the fact that the ideology of the current US empire -- neoliberalism (called here "liberal progressivism") -- became discredited after 2008. What happened after the collapse of the Marxist ideology with the USSR is well known. It took 46 years (if we assume that the collapse started in 1945 as the result of victory in WWII, when the Soviet army has a chance to see the standard of living in Western countries). Why the USA should be different ? Decline of empires is very slow and can well take a half a century. Let's say it might take 50 years from 9/11 or October 2008.
One telling sign is the end of "American hegemony" in the global political sphere. One telling sign is the end of "American hegemony" in the global political sphere. As Lupita hypothesized here Trump might be the last desperate attempt to reverse this process.
Another, the deterioration of the standard of living of the USA population and declining infrastructure, both typically are connected with the overextension of empire. In Fortune ( http://fortune.com/2015/07/20/united-states-decline-statistics-economic/ ) Jill Coplan lists 12 signs of the decline.
Trump election is another sign of turmoil. The key message of his election is "The institutions we once trusted deceived us" That includes the Democratic Party and all neoliberal MSM. Like was the case with the USSR, the loss of influence of neoliberal propaganda machine is a definite sign of the decline of empire.
Degeneration of the neoliberal political elite that is also clearly visible in the current set of presidential candidates might be another sign. Hillary Clinton dragged to the car on 9/11 commemorative event vividly reminds the state of health of a couple of members of Soviet Politburo .
See also:
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Nov 14, 2016 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
by Lambert Strether By Lambert Strether of Corrente .This post is not an explainer about why and how Clinton lost (and Trump won). I think we're going to be sorting that out for awhile. Rather, it's a simple debunking of common talking points by Clinton loyalists and Democrat Establishment operatives; the sort of talking point you might hear on Twitter, entirely shorn of caveats and context. For each of the three talking points, I'll present an especially egregious version of the myth, followed by a rebuttals.
Realize that Trump's margin of victory was incredibly small. From the Washington Post :
How Trump won the presidency with razor-thin margins in swing states
Of the more than 120 million votes cast in the 2016 election, 107,000 votes in three states [Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania] effectively decided the election.
Of course, America's first-past-the-post system and the electoral college amplify small margins into decisive results. And it was the job of the Clinton campaign to find those 107,000 votes and win them; the Clinton operation turned out to be weaker than anyone would have imagined when it counted . However, because Trump has what might be called an institutional mandate - both the executive and legislative branches and soon, perhaps, the judicial - the narrowness of his margin means he doesn't have a popular mandate. Trump has captured the state, but by no means civil society; therefore, the opposition that seeks to delegitimize him is in a stronger position than it may realize.
Hence the necessity for reflection; seeking truth from facts, as the saying goes. Because the following talking points prevent a (vulgar) identity politics -dominated Democrat Party from owning its loss, debunking them is then important beyond winning your Twitter wars. I'm trying to spike the Blame Cannons!
Talking Point: Clinton was Defeated by Racism
Here's a headline showing the talking point from a Vox explainer :
Trump's win is a reminder of the incredible, unbeatable power of racism
The subtext here is usually that if you don't chime in with vehement agreement, you're a racist yourself, and possibly a racist Trump supporter. There are two reasons this talking point is false.
First, voter caring levels dropped from 2012 to 2016, especially among black Democrats . Carl Beijer :
From 2012 to 2016, both men and women went from caring about the outcome to not caring. Among Democratic men and women, as well as Republican women, care levels dropped about 3-4 points; Republican men cared a little less too, but only by one point. Across the board, in any case, the plurality of voters simply didn't care.
Beijer includes the following chart (based on Edison exit polling cross-referenced with total population numbers from the US Census):
Beijer interprets:
White voters cared even less in 2016 then in 2012, when they also didn't care; most of that apathy came from white Republicans compared to white Democrats, who dropped off a little less. Voters of color, in contrast, continued to care – but their care levels dropped even more, by 8 points (compared to the 6 point drop-off among white voters). Incredibly, that drop was driven entirely by a 9 point drop among Democratic voters of color which left Democrats with only slim majority 51% support; Republicans, meanwhile, actually gained support among people of color.
Beijer's data is born out by anecdote from Milwaukee, Wisconsin :
Urban areas, where black and Hispanic voters are concentrated along with college-educated voters, already leaned toward the Democrats, but Clinton did not get the turnout from these groups that she needed. For instance, black voters did not show up in the same numbers they did for Barack Obama, the first black president, in 2008 and 2012.
Remember, Trump won Wisconsin by a whisker. So for this talking point to be true, we have to believe that black voters stayed home because they were racist, costing Clinton Wisconsin.
Second, counties that voted for Obama in 2012 voted for Trump in 2016 . The Washington Post :
These former Obama strongholds sealed the election for Trump. Of the nearly 700 counties that twice sent Obama to the White House, a stunning one-third flipped to support Trump .
The Obama-Trump counties were critical in delivering electoral victories for Trump. Many of them fall in states that supported Obama in 2012, but Trump in 2016. In all, these flipped states accounted for 83 electoral votes. (Michigan and New Hampshire could add to this total, but their results were not finalized as of 4 p.m. Wednesday.)
Here's the chart:
And so, for this talking point to be true, we have to believe that counties who voted for the black man in 2012 were racist because they didn't vote for the white women in 2016. Bringing me, I suppose, to sexism.
Talking Point: Clinton was Defeated by Sexism
Here's an article showing the talking point from Newsweek :
This often vitriolic campaign was a national referendum on women and power.
(The subtext here is usually that if you don't join the consensus cluster, you're a sexist yourself, and possibly a sexist Trump supporter). And if you only look at the averages this claim might seem true :
On Election Day, women responded accordingly, as Clinton beat Trump among women 54 percent to 42 percent. They were voting not so much for her as against him and what he brought to the surface during his campaign: quotidian misogyny.
There are two reasons this talking point is not true. First, averages conceal, and what they conceal is class . As you read further into the article, you can see it fall apart:
In fact, Trump beat Clinton among white women 53 percent to 43 percent, with white women without college degrees going for [Trump] two to one .
So, taking lack of a college degree as a proxy for being working class, for Newsweek's claim to be true, you have to believe that working class women don't get a vote in their referendum, and for the talking point to be true, you have to believe that working class women are sexist. Which leads me to ask: Who died and left the bourgeois feminists in Clinton's base in charge of the definition of sexism, or feminism? Class traitor Tina Brown is worth repeating:
Here's my own beef. Liberal feminists, young and old, need to question the role they played in Hillary's demise. The two weeks of media hyperventilation over grab-her-by-the-pussygate, when the airwaves were saturated with aghast liberal women equating Trump's gross comments with sexual assault, had the opposite effect on multiple women voters in the Heartland.
These are resilient women, often working two or three jobs, for whom boorish men are an occasional occupational hazard, not an existential threat. They rolled their eyes over Trump's unmitigated coarseness, but still bought into his spiel that he'd be the greatest job producer who ever lived. Oh, and they wondered why his behaviour was any worse than Bill's.
Missing this pragmatic response by so many women was another mistake of Robbie Mook's campaign data nerds. They computed that America's women would all be as outraged as the ones they came home to at night. But pink slips have hit entire neighbourhoods, and towns. The angry white working class men who voted in such strength for Trump do not live in an emotional vacuum. They are loved by white working class women – their wives, daughters, sisters and mothers, who participate in their remaindered pain. I t is everywhere in the interviews. "My dad lost his business", "My husband hasn't been the same since his job at the factory went away" .
Second, Clinton in 2016 did no better than Obama in 2008 with women (although she did better than Obama in 2012). From the New York Times analysis of the exit polls, this chart...
So, for this talking point to be true, you have to believe that sexism simultaneously increased the male vote for Trump, yet did not increase the female vote for Clinton. Shouldn't they move in opposite directions?
Talking Point: Clinton was Defeated by Stupidity
Here's an example of this talking point from Foreign Policy , the heart of The Blob. The headline:
Trump Won Because Voters Are Ignorant, Literally
And the lead:
OK, so that just happened. Donald Trump always enjoyed massive support from uneducated, low-information white people. As Bloomberg Politics reported back in August, Hillary Clinton was enjoying a giant 25 percentage-point lead among college-educated voters going into the election. (Whether that trend held up remains to be seen.) In contrast, in the 2012 election, college-educated voters just barely favored Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. Last night we saw something historic: the dance of the dunces. Never have educated voters so uniformly rejected a candidate. But never before have the lesser-educated so uniformly supported a candidate.
The subtext here is usually that if you don't accept nod your head vigorously, you're stupid, and possibly a stupid Trump supporter. There are two reasons this talking point is not true.
First, even assuming that the author's happy but unconscious conflation of credentials with education is correct, it wasn't the "dunces" who lost two wars, butchered the health care system, caused the financial system to collapse through accounting control fraud, or invented the neoliberal ideology that was kept real wages flat for forty years and turned the industrial heartland into a wasteland. That is solely, solely down to - only some , to be fair - college-educated voters. It is totally and 100% not down to the "dunces"; they didn't have the political or financial power to achieve debacles on the grand scale.
Second, the "dunces" were an important part of Obama's victories . From The Week :
Not only has polling repeatedly underplayed the importance of white voters without college degrees, it's underplayed their importance to the Obama coalition: They were one-third of Obama votes in 2012. They filled the gap between upper-class whites and working-class nonwhites. Trump gained roughly 15 percentage points with them compared to Romney in 2012.
So, to believe this talking point, you have to believe that voters who were smart when they voted for Obama suddenly became stupid when it came time to vote for Clinton. You also have to believe that credentialed policy makers have an unblemished record of success, and that only they are worth paying attention to.
Conclusion
Of course, Clinton ran a miserable campaign, too, which didn't help. Carl Beijer has a bill of particulars :
By just about every metric imaginable, Hillary Clinton led one of the worst presidential campaigns in modern history. It was a profoundly reactionary campaign, built entirely on rolling back the horizons of the politically possible, fracturing left solidarity, undermining longstanding left priorities like universal healthcare, pandering to Wall Street oligarchs, fomenting nationalism against Denmark and Russia, and rehabilitating some of history's greatest monsters – from Bush I to Kissinger. It was a grossly unprincipled campaign that belligerently violated FEC Super PAC coordination rules and conspired with party officials on everything from political attacks to debate questions. It was an obscenely stupid campaign that all but ignored Wisconsin during the general election, that pitched Clinton to Latino voters as their abuela, that centered an entire high-profile speech over the national menace of a few thousand anime nazis on Twitter, and that repeatedly deployed Lena Dunham as a media surrogate.
Which is rather like running a David Letterman ad in a Pennsylvania steel town. It must have seemed like a good idea in Brooklyn. After all, they had so many celebrities to choose from.
* * * All three talking points oversimplify. I'm not saying racism is not powerful; of course it is. I'm not saying that sexism is not powerful; of course it is. But monocausal explanations in an election this close - and in a country this vast - are foolish. And narratives that ignore economics and erase class are worse than foolish; buying into them will cause us to make the same mistakes over and over and over again.[1] The trick will be to integrate multiple causes, and that's down to the left; identity politics liberals don't merely not want to do this; they actively oppose it. Ditto their opposite numbers in America's neoliberal fun house mirror, the conservatives.
NOTES
[1] For some, that's not a bug. It's a feature.
NOTE
You will have noticed that I haven't covered economics (class), or election fraud at all. More myths are coming.
Lambert Strether has been blogging, managing online communities, and doing system administration 24/7 since 2003, in Drupal and WordPress. Besides political economy and the political scene, he blogs about rhetoric, software engineering, permaculture, history, literature, local politics, international travel, food, and fixing stuff around the house. The nom de plume "Lambert Strether" comes from Henry James's The Ambassadors: "Live all you can. It's a mistake not to." You can follow him on Twitter at @lambertstrether. http://www.correntewire.com
TK421 November 14, 2016 at 1:03 pmKnot Galt November 14, 2016 at 1:23 pmYes, I'm a sexist because I voted for Jill Stein instead of Hillary Clinton.
IdahoSpud November 14, 2016 at 1:07 pm"No, you are ignorant! You threw away the vote and put Trump in charge." Please, it will be important to know what derogatory camp you belong in when the blame game swings into full gear. *snark
rwv November 14, 2016 at 1:21 pmIs it sexist, racist, and/or stupid to conclude that one awful candidate is less likely to betray you than a different awful candidate?
Steve H. November 14, 2016 at 1:26 pmDidn't feel the Bern, and if you burn your ass you'll have to sit on the blisters
Jason Boxman November 14, 2016 at 1:26 pmTalking Point: Clinton was Defeated by Stupidity
'Stupid' was the word I got very tired of in my social net. Two variant targets:
1) Blacks for not voting their interests. The responses included 'we know who our enemies are' and 'don't tell me what to think.'
2) Mostly it was vs rural, non-college educated. iirc, it was the Secretary of Agriculture, pleading for funds, who said the rural areas were where military recruits came from. A young fella I know, elite football player on elite non-urban HS team, said most of his teammates had enlisted. So they are the ones getting shot at, having relatives and friends come back missing pieces of body and self.
My guy in the Reserves said the consensus was that if HRC got elected, they were going to war with Russia. Not enthused. Infantry IQ is supposedly average-80, but they know who Yossarian says the enemy is, e'en if they hant read the book.
Maybe not so stupid after all.
Thanks so much for this!
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jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com
You can fool all of the people, some of the time. You can fool some of the people all of the time- but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."There are two theories of prosperity and of well-being: The first theory is that if we make the rich richer, somehow they will let a part of their prosperity trickle down to the rest of us. The second theory - and I suppose this goes back to the days of Noah - I won't say Adam and Eve, because they had a less complicated situation - but, at least, back in the days of the flood, there was the theory that if we make the average of mankind comfortable and secure, their prosperity will rise upward, just as yeast rises up, through the ranks...We so easily forget. Once the cry of so-called prosperity is heard in the land, we all become so stampeded by the spirit of the god Mammon, that we cannot serve the dictates of social conscience. . . . We are here to serve notice that the economic order is the invention of man; and that it cannot dominate certain eternal principles of justice and of God...
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Here is Youtube video
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Nov 14, 2016 | www.breitbart.com
Sunday on CBS's "Face The Nation," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said President-elect Donald Trump won because "Democrats have focused too much with a liberal elite" while ignoring the working class.Sanders said, " How does it happen that they win elections and Democrats lose? I think what the conclusion is, is that that is raising incredible sums of money from wealthy people … but has ignored to a very significant degree, working class, middle class, and low income people in this country. "
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Nov 14, 2016 | discussion.theguardian.com
weejonnie Intheround 11h ago ...In the last 8 years the Democrat party.Lost control of the Senate
Lost control of the House of Representatives
Lost control of dozens of state legislatures and Governorships.
The Republicans control 36 States of America - One more and they could in theory amend the Constitution.In Wisconsin (notionally Democrat) the Legislature and Governor are both Republican controlled. And Clinton didn't even campaign there when it was pretty obvious the State was not trending towards her.
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Nov 11, 2016 | www.globalresearch.ca
So-called [neo]liberals and leftists in the US and around the world, are now wailing and gnashing their teeth in reaction to Hillary Clinton's crushing defeat. They are, however, the first to blame for the outcome of the US presidential elections. Their candidate, Hillary Clinton, was the embodiment of a totally corrupt political system. She is a hypocrite par excellence, talking to the bankiers of Wall Street behind closed doors differently than to the American people. Her rhetoric for the rights of women and blacks and other minorities sounded disingenuous.
The Clinton Foundation received large donations from Saudi-Arabia and Qatar, countries rewarded in return by huge arms transfers overseen by her as Secretary of State. Her involvement in this corruption was no theme for the media.
According to emails published by WikiLeaks, her campaign manager John Podesta was or is on the payroll of the Saudis. All of this was not considered worth reporting by the media. Virtually all national media in the United States supported Clinton's candidacy. Instead of reporting how the machinery of the Democratic Party and the Clinton team stole the primary elections to prevent the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the media demonized Donald Trump.
I do not wish here to defend Donald Trump. He made numerous stupid, racist, sexist, and anti-Islamic statements that were rightly criticized. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, was treated with kid gloves while her huge criminal political record was glossed over. Instead of coming to grips with their abject failures, the liberals and their media continue in slandering Donald Trump. Trump's first declarations show already that he has conquered new frontiers.
An American President is not a free and politically independent person. From day one, a President-elect can't anymore go around the corner and grab a hot dog or a hamburger. He is reigned in by a military and security establishment that holds the President fit for public consumption. Trump, as any other president, can be expected to follow their rule and political suggestions.
I doubt very much that Trump will keep the promises of his election campaign, such as building a wall along the American-Mexican border, deport all illegal immigrants or ban Muslims from immigrating into the US. I even doubt that he will go after Hillary Clinton and her husband's dubious foundation. There exists a code of honor among thieves.
Trump won precisely because of the shrill one-sided media propaganda and because of his rhetoric against the Washington establishment , including his own Republican Party. Now, this Republican establishment dominates both houses of Congress. Trump belongs also, however, to the US establishment but of another sort. Nobody should believe that the Washington establishment will follow Trump's lead. Even his positive statements about Vladimir Putin or his suggestion to discard NATO, will probably vanish. But what I do hope is that he stands to his rejection of TPP and TTIP and his pragmatic view of Vladimir Putin.
Whether Trump will stop American adventurism in the Middle East remains to be seen. His close ties with Netanyahu do not bode well for the Palestinians. He sees Zionist colonization of the rest of Palestine as no hindrance to peace. And while he has promised to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, I doubt that he will carry out this provocation against international law and the entire Muslim world.
The German political and media class was not only surprised by the results of the US elections, but did not even try to hide its revulsion against the choice of the American people. The entire political class in Germany perceived and presented the Trump campaign in the same one-sided manner as American media did. Chancellor Angela Merke l sent the President-Elect Trump a warning in the guise of a congratulation. Her political impudence was garbed within obsequious blabber about the allegedly honorable nature of German-American ties:
"Germany and America are bound by common values - democracy, freedom, as well as respect for the rule of law and the dignity of each and every person, regardless of their origin, skin color, creed, gender, sexual orientation, or political views. It is based on these values that I wish to offer close cooperation, both with me personally and between our countries' governments."
Other German politicians did not even attempt to hide their disdain for American voters by diplomatic language. Germany's Foreign Minister Steinmeier called Trump a "preacher of hate", and Deputy Chancellor Gabriel cartooned Trump as a
"trailblazer of a new authoritarian and chauvinist international movement… [who wants] a rollback to the bad old times in which women belonged by the stove or in bed, gays in jail and unions at best at the side table."
During the election campaign, Trump called Merkel's mass-immigration policy "insane" and "what Merkel did to Germany" a "sad shame".
The media and the political class should at this point stop pontificating. Their double morals and unprofessional coverage of the US elections should prompt them to more humility. They should rather blame themselves for their biased reporting, which led directly to Clinton's defeat. Ordinary Americans are not as stupid as the Establishment wants us to believe. Established parties and media would be well advised to give the new US President a chance to prove his worth. There will be, without doubt, many occasions in the future for fact-based criticism.
The original source of this article is Global Research Copyright © Dr. Ludwig Watzal , Global Research, 2016
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Nov 13, 2016 | strata-sphere.com
First, this from Slate :This is a grueling but necessarily treatise on how the Political Elite played God and got burned. The essence here is wake up and fix the Democrat Party.The Democratic Party establishment has beclowned itself and is finished.
… The party establishment made a grievous mistake rallying around Hillary Clinton. It wasn't just a lack of recent political seasoning. She was a bad candidate, with no message beyond heckling the opposite sideline. She was a total misfit for both the politics of 2016 and the energy of the Democratic Party as currently constituted. She could not escape her baggage, and she must own that failure herself.
Theoretically smart people in the Democratic Party should have known that. And yet they worked giddily to clear the field for her. Every power-hungry young Democrat fresh out of law school, every rising lawmaker, every old friend of the Clintons wanted a piece of the action. This was their ride up the power chain. The whole edifice was hollow, built atop the same unearned sense of inevitability that surrounded Clinton in 2008, and it collapsed, just as it collapsed in 2008, only a little later in the calendar. The voters of the party got taken for a ride by the people who controlled it, the ones who promised they had everything figured out and sneeringly dismissed anyone who suggested otherwise. They promised that Hillary Clinton had a lock on the Electoral College. These people didn't know what they were talking about, and too many of us in the media thought they did.
And here is another good assessment :
The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so.
It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump's victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story , after having spent months mocking the people who had a better sense of what was going on.
This is all symptomatic of modern journalism's great moral and intellectual failing: its unbearable smugness . Had Hillary Clinton won, there's be a winking "we did it" feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.
So much for that. The audience for our glib analysis and contempt for much of the electorate, it turned out, was rather limited. This was particularly true when it came to voters, the ones who turned out by the millions to deliver not only a rebuke to the political system but also the people who cover it. Trump knew what he was doing when he invited his crowds to jeer and hiss the reporters covering him. They hate us, and have for some time.
And can you blame them? Journalists love mocking Trump supporters. We insult their appearances. We dismiss them as racists and sexists. We emote on Twitter about how this or that comment or policy makes us feel one way or the other, and yet we reject their feelings as invalid.
Understand something, the caricature of Trump and his supporters is all fiction! It was the wallpaper inside the bubble of the elites that kept them from having to face the fact they are being rejected by the people of this country.
It is not racist to want to control our borders and stem the influx – for a period – of people from other lands. It is not racist to note that Islam has a violent element willing to kill innocents at any time and any place. Just like one bad cop can give all cops a bad rap, so can a handful of bloody insane Muslims. It is not racist or nativist to deport immigrants who have committed serious felonies.
The media over stated the drivers behind these views to propel their candidate to victory. They were not reporting facts.
The last good perspective was from the Morning Joe show:
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Nov 13, 2016 | www.moonofalabama.org
Today I discussed the U.S. election with a friend who studied and practices statistics. I asked about the failure of the polls in this years presidential election. Her explanation: The polls are looking at future events but are biased by the past. The various companies and institutions adjust the polls they do by looking at their past prognoses and the real results of the past event. They then develop correcting factors, measured from the past, and apply it to new polls. If that correcting factor is wrong, possibly because of structural changes in the electorate, then the new polls will be corrected with a wrong factor and thus miss the real results.
Polls predicting the last presidential election were probably off by 3 or 5 points towards the Republican side. The pollsters then corrected the new polls for the Clinton-Trump race in favor of the Democratic side by giving that side an additional 3-5 points. They thereby corrected the new polls by the bias that was poll inherent during the last race.
But structural changes, which we seem to have had during this election, messed up the result. Many people who usually vote for the Democratic ticket did not vote for Clinton. The "not Clinton" progressives, the "bernie bros" and "deplorables" who voted Obama in the last election stayed home, voted for a third party candidate or even for Trump. The pollsters did not anticipate such a deep change. Thus their correction factor was wrong. Thus the Clinton side turned out to be favored in polls but not in the relevant votes.
Real polling, which requires in depth-in person interviews with the participants, does not really happen anymore. It is simply to expensive. Polling today is largely done by telephone with participants selected by some database algorithm. It is skewed by many factors which require many corrections. All these corrections have some biases that do miss structural changes in the underlying population.
The Clinton camp, the media and the pollsters missed what we had anticipated as "not Clinton". A basic setting in a part of the "left" electorate that remember who she is and what she has done and would under no circumstances vote for her. Clinton herself pushed the "bernie bros" and "deplorables" into that camp. This was a structural change that was solely based in the personality of the candidate.
If Sanders would have been the candidate the now wrong poll correction factor in favor of Democrats would likely have been a correct one. The deep antipathy against Hillary Clinton in a decisive part of the electorate was a factor that the pseudo-science of cheap telephone polls could not catch. More expensive in depth interviews of the base population used by a pollster would probably have caught this factor and adjusted appropriately.
There were some twenty to thirty different entities doing polls during this election cycle. Five to ten polling entities, with better budgets and preparations, would probably have led to better prognoses. Some media companies could probably join their poll budgets, split over multiple companies today, to have a common one with a better analysis of its base population.One that would have anticipated "not Hillary".
Unless that happens all polls will have to be read with a lot of doubt. What past bias is captured in these predictions of the future? What are their structural assumptions and are these still correct? What structural change might have happened?
Even then polls and their interpretation will always only capture a part of the story. Often a sound grasp of human and cultural behavior will allow for better prediction as all polls. As my friend the statistician say: "The best prognostic instrument I have even today is my gut."
Oscar Romero | Nov 13, 2016 3:23:53 PM | 1
An equally interesting question about polls: what about the exit polls? If Greg Palast and others are right, exit polls indicate that the voting was rigged. What does your statistics friend think about that?Andrea | Nov 13, 2016 3:28:21 PM | 2After the 1948 election, statisticians started to get rid of the quota sampling for electoral polls. After this election, it's time to reassess Statistics.ab initio | Nov 13, 2016 3:30:01 PM | 3https://www.math.upenn.edu/~deturck/m170/wk4/lecture/case2.html
NeverHillary turned out to be bigger than NeverTrump. Hillary got less than 6 million votes compared to Obama. Trump got nearly as much as Romney.stumpy | Nov 13, 2016 3:45:38 PM | 4A good indicator was the size of the crowds each candidate drew to their rallies. Clinton tended to show more "bought" TV-ready extras. Bernie blew the walls out at his rallies, as did Trump. You can't look at that and say the polls are even close to accurate.Hoarsewhisperer | Nov 13, 2016 4:00:50 PM | 5I suspect that the future of polling isn't as dire as you're painting it, b. There was huge anti-Trump bias in the Jew-controlled Christian-West Media from the beginning of the campaign. You drew attention to negative MSM bias yourself in the post which pointed out how consistently wrong the Punditocracy had been in predicting the imminent failure of the Trump campaign - thereby rubbing their noses in their own ineptitude and tomfoolery.Mudduck | Nov 13, 2016 4:01:15 PM | 6One factor which seemed important to me was occasionally hilighted at regular intervals by commenters here at MoA... The (apparent) fact that Trump addressed more, and bigger, crowds than Mrs Clinton. I accepted those claims as fact, and didn't bother to check their veracity. But nevertheless crowd size and frequency seems to have played a pivotal role in the outcome (as one would expect in a political campaign).
Exit polls have provided checks on the accuracy of the vote count -- but are liable to the same problem as the opinion pols, people who don't admit to their real position.Steve | Nov 13, 2016 4:03:18 PM | 7I'm not surprised that the polls fail badly in this presidential election. When the Democrats unleashed thugs on Trump supporters while the media studiously looked away, it was not sensible to openly identify with Trump. Even Trump was saying so through out the campaign.The Democrats together with their media partners truly believed that Donald Trump's alleged character flaws would be enough to win the election. Despite the fact that it was obvious to anyone without a blinker on that the momentum was on the side of Trump all along. Obama's phenomenon of 08 was nothing compared to Trump's phenomenon of this year, but because neither the MSM nor the Pollsters liked him they transferred their biases to their jobs. In any case I'm sure happy that the result of the election turned out different from the skewed prognosis.jawbone | Nov 13, 2016 4:08:45 PM | 8On Wednesday after the election, I heard an interview with a woman reporter who worked with the 538 polling group. She said that it was impossible for most reporters to really investigate how voters in certain areas of the country were feeling about the election bcz newspapers and other news organizations, including the Big Broadcasters, did not have the ability to pay for enough reporters to actually talk to people.virgile | Nov 13, 2016 4:12:32 PM | 9Since statistics had worked so well, and were cheaper to deal with, they won the day. And lost the battle.
Now, most people at this site seemed to base their decisions of whom to vote for based on stands on issues and known actions of the various candidates. But, even so, we probably paid attention to the polling results. I know I took into consideration that Hillary would win big in NJ, leaving me free to vote for Jill Stein. Based on known actions of Trump I could not vote for him, even tho' I hoped he would kill TPP and have better relations with Russia. I feared and still do fear his nominations to the Supreme Court. (I am not religious, but if I were I would pray daily, perhaps hourly, for the continued good health of the Justices Kennedy, GInsburg, and Breyer. I would hope the other Dem appointed justices would take care to avoid, oh, small airplanes....
Would Hillary have adjusted her campaign if she could have seen the rising disappointment of the working class Dems (even middle class to higher income Dems)? I don't know. I do know that her husband ran his first campaign on the famous "It's the economy, stupid" reminder.
Somehow, I don't think it would have registered enough.
And Obama ran on Hope and Change, but was always the Corporatist Dem Wall Street wanted. What a waste. And now we have four more years of doing essentially nothing aboug climate change. It was have been a strategy to put off even regulatory actions to lessen CO2 emissions until near the end of his second term, but, dang, it makes it easier for Trump to negate those efforts.
Again, what a waste. But I didn't vote for Obama for either term bcz I saw that his actions as IL state senator and as US senator were always looking out for the Big Money, Big Corporations, and seldom worked for anyone below the middle class, more the top of the middle class.
This Wasn't A Vote, It Was An Uprisingvirgile | Nov 13, 2016 4:15:15 PM | 10
Paul Craig Roberts • November 12, 2016 >Polls mean nothing when there is an uprising
No need of polls...say PBSjoey | Nov 13, 2016 4:19:53 PM | 11A long explanatory report which signifies nothing critical. "The polls were wrong??" No. The polls reported by MSM were wrong.Big time, including from those from Clinton loving CBC here in Canada, which for an extended time was reporting Hillary with an 11% lead. That number was far beyond any minor adjustments, for sure.
There were polls, such as Rasmussen, itself suspected of fiddling, which were reporting ups and downs of 2%, and ended up tied election day.
So, please schemers, please do not try to cover up the MSM's deliberate attempt to influence results by using garbage numbers. Figures can lie, and liars can sure figure.
claudio | Nov 13, 2016 4:23:05 PM | 13the Los Angeles Times polls were correct (although the paper was pro-Clinton); can't get the link now, but they explained how they weighted their polls on the basis of the enthusiasm displayed for the preferred candidate, and Trump supporters were more "charged"mischi | Nov 13, 2016 4:25:01 PM | 14I disagree with your friend, b. I read many stories about how the polls were fixed for Clinton for months before the election.james | Nov 13, 2016 4:26:58 PM | 15The pollsters took the % of voters from the Obama election but they also added more Democrats than were representative in the 2012 election, thereby skewing the polls for Clinton. Many believed that the reason they did this was to try to manipulate the voting machines in Clinton's favour and have the polls match the result. I think that Trump crying foul so early got them worried that they might be caught. Remember, voting machines in 14 states are run by companies affiliated with Soros.
i go back to what my sociology of the media instructor said.. polls are for massaging people's brains.. unless one knows who pays for them and what goes into them, they are just another propaganda tool for use..Hoarsewhisperer | Nov 13, 2016 4:34:08 PM | 16...BraveNewWorld | Nov 13, 2016 4:35:07 PM | 17
Polls mean nothing when there is an uprising
Posted by: virgile | Nov 13, 2016 4:12:32 PM | 9Well, the Clinton-ista's and Soro-fuls certainly wasted no time when they switched from Anticipated Gloat to Full Spectrum Panic Mode, did they?
It has been known for a long time in the polling world that polling numbers are getting more and more unreliable because fewer and fewer people are willing to complete polls.Quadriad | Nov 13, 2016 4:41:10 PM | 18I have a weird conspiracy hypothesis that I mainly made up on my own;Quadriad | Nov 13, 2016 4:43:54 PM | 19The last FBI "reopening" and the quick subsequent "close-down" felt all too counter-intuitive and silly, when examined solely based on their face value.
However, what if there was more to this? What if this was a final threat from FBI to the Soros-Clinton mafia to "quickly unrig the voting machines" OR we will arrest the lot of you? Which, once the promises were made by "allow fair play", required FBI to pull back as their part of the deal?
Just an idea...
This - admittedly conspiracy - theory would also explain the newspaper polls largely rigged to correspond to the planned vote theft, as well as the idiotic magnitude of overconfidence seen in the Pol-Est/MS Media/Wall Street complex.psychohistorian | Nov 13, 2016 5:02:02 PM | 20Sorry on the split-think and double-post.
I find it interesting b that you and your friend didn't seem to talk at all about the polling questions....at least that you shared with us. It is my experience and education that even with a "beauty contest" that we just had, that the structure of the polling questions make all the difference in how people being polled respond.Laguerre | Nov 13, 2016 5:15:19 PM | 21Polls are funded by parties with agendas and the questions, assumptions and biases are baked in to the result......IMO, they are all worthless or worse than that because folks see them, like the media as being something of an authority figure and therefore believable which we know is total BS.
Polls are just another propaganda tool of those rich enough to use them in their quiver of control.
Timid Trumpists is the major factor, I would think. A factor already well known in UK. People who are going to vote for a non-PC solution hesitate to admit it to poll questions.somebody | Nov 13, 2016 5:15:50 PM | 22All of the above is true, but - in addition - polls are used to manipulate campaigns.Quadriad | Nov 13, 2016 5:29:03 PM | 23People sympathize with someone who is considered a winner and when someone is considered likely to lose people lose interest.
To get the vote out polls have to be tight. In addition to that polls are used to motivate donors. In the end there has to be a reason pollsters get paid.
But even if polls would be done for purely scientific reasons, this election was impossible to poll. The correct question would have been "Do you hate/fear candidate x enough to motivate you to queue for voting for canditate y, or are you too disgusted to bother at all"
In the end, it was not the wrong polls that sank Clinton but the strategy to leave the anti-elitist populist stuff to Trump and - unsuccessfully concentrate on winning the elitist Republican anti Trump vote. That way she lost more of the Democrat Sanders vote than she could gain right wing.
The other factor was her reliance on television ads and media ties (they all backed her), a reluctance to talk to large audiences and an inability to communicate via social media.
It is possible though she never had a chance against a well established reality show brand.
The good news is that after this election campaigns will be done mainly low cost social media. The bad news is that these campaigns will be more fact free than ever and that the age of independent quality newspapers is over.
#22 somebodylikklemore | Nov 13, 2016 5:35:21 PM | 24So, you're saying that the age of independent quality newspapers has just ended, like about now. Interesting pov...
Somehow, the last few years of the MSM coverage of the NATO-Salafist War on Syria have had me convinced that the "independent quality newspapers" have become a*rse-wipe material a long time ago. Instead, we get the Sorosoid ZioTakfirism.
But, yeah, maybe it's all Trump's fault. Hey I also blame Hezbollah for kicking Yisrael's arse north of Litani in 2006. If they didn't piss of the Yivrim this much, maybe they wouldn't have punitively collapsed the faith in the Western Society from the inside.
Ultimately, it's all Putin's fault. He started it all by beating the pro-Saudi Chechens into a pulp back in 1999, and started the NATOQAEDA self-destruction.
In this election, Pollsters got it wrong.Jackrabbit | Nov 13, 2016 5:44:28 PM | 25Two Exceptions:
1. IBD/TIPP (A collaboration of Investors Business Daily and TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence). TechnoMetrica was consistent throughout – final poll for election day had Trump leading by 2%. Also predicted the last presidential elections back to 2004.
Methodology
"Traditional Telephone method" includes cell –live interviews by Region; Age; Gender; Race; Income; Education; Party; Ideology; Investor; Area Type; Parental Status; White – men, women; Black/Hispanic; Women-single, married; Household description –Upper/Middle-Middle, Working, Lower; Religion; Union Household; Intensity of Support.
http://www.investors.com/politics/ibd-tipp-presidential-election-poll/
and
2. LATimes
This election candidates' crowd draw was a good indicator. It was very difficult to pre-program the Diebold machines. MSM polls were in the bag for Hillary, had her ahead. It backfired.Is Newsweek embarrassed yet? They forgot some history. Truman-Dewey. Madam President! How appropriate.
Some of b's posts regarding US politics seems naive but I chalk that up to his not being American. But this technocratic excuse for the polling is just wrong. b, what happened to your skeptical view of Western media????ben | Nov 13, 2016 5:46:27 PM | 26virgile @ 9: An excerpt: " It was about the union men who refused to sell out their futures and vote for a Democrat who is an agent of the One Percent."voislav | Nov 13, 2016 6:13:07 PM | 27And now, I fear, they still have no future.
James @ 15 said.." polls are for massaging people's brains.. unless one knows who pays for them and what goes into them, they are just another propaganda tool for use..
How true..
Trumps choices for his cabinet don't leave much room for positive change, for the millions of disaffected voters who put him in office. We'll see!
A bit about polling methodology explains the bias we've seen this election cycle. Typically, the polling samples are not big enough to be representative, so the results are corrected (weighted) based on the participant responses. The polls assume certain turnout percentages for different groups (Democrats, Republicans, Independents, rural, urban, ethnicity, gender etc.). A lot of the polls were weighting the polls with turnouts similar to 2012, corrected for the expected demographic changes over the last 4 years.jo6pac | Nov 13, 2016 6:18:04 PM | 28Poll weighing is a tricky business. This is why most polling has a 4% error margin, so it does not produce as accurate picture as is typically presented by the media. The error is not randomly distributed, it is closely related to the poll weighting. The weighting error was favouring Clinton in the polls as it assumed higher Democratic turnout, which ended up not being the case, she underperformed 2012 significantly and lost the election.
It is important to stress that the election results ended up within the margin of error (+-4%). The polls were not wrong, it is the media and the analyst who over-interpreted the data and gave Clinton the win where she did not have a statistically significant (<4%) lead. This is why if Nate Silver at 538 was consistently writing that the polls in many of the swing states were within the error margin, although favouring Clinton, and their election prediction still gave Trump a ~30% chance of victory. Other analysts were more careless (hello Huffington Post) and even made fun of 538 for giving Trump any chance of victory.
There is no way to make more accurate polling for the future elections as the accuracy of the poll is tied in to poll weighing, which is guesswork (although somewhat educated by the historical data). Short of forcing everyone to vote, election-to-election turnout will change and affect the accuracy of the polls.
Some fun but sadly true.Quadriad | Nov 13, 2016 6:18:19 PM | 29#8 this for you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-5Y74FrDCc&index=25&list=WL
#25 Yep
#27 voiolysias | Nov 13, 2016 6:18:32 PM | 30Instead of interpreting every single of those Polls as plausibly biased on one side, why don't you take the entire population of Western MSM Polls, and see if their median predicted outcome vs actual final outcome difference is statistically significant?
I'd say you'd find their entire population to be likely biased at least to six-sigma level.
(I have no time to show this myself, just proposing someone's hypothesis, as a research idea for someone's M Sci thesis for example)
I have lived in the D.C. area for the past 22 years with a land line phone and am listed in the White Pages. I have never been called by a pollster, although I am often called by political campaigns. I do not know anyone who has been called by a pollster.jdmckay | Nov 13, 2016 6:35:22 PM | 32Palast puts up good information that difference was good 'ole GOP voter purges.jfl | Nov 13, 2016 6:40:08 PM | 33Are the polls done to discover "what's up", or are they done to project the view that one side is winning?I go with the second view. That's what the 'corrections' are all about. The 'corrections' need to be dropped completely.
Unless that happens all polls will have to be read with a lot of doubt.
Mike Whitney posted a link to a guy who got it right ... Patrick Caddell; The Pollster Who 'Got it Right' . His methods were not those of the captive pollsters.
More expensive in depth interviews of the base population used by a pollster would probably have caught this factor and adjusted appropriately.
No more 'adjustments' allowed. A desire to actually discover the lay of the land and to publish it is what's required. Good luck on getting that from the political class and/or their captive msm. Everything they do is a lie, calculated to keep themselves in power.chipnik | Nov 13, 2016 6:42:19 PM | 34
The polls were obviously blatantly skewed towards urban Blue zones, and did not include working adults in Red zones, then were 'massaged' by reporting media in clearly a Rodham-paid PAC marketing campaign to brand the sheeples 'Wear Rodham!'ben | Nov 13, 2016 6:42:20 PM | 35Only Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight even came close, but he had to rely on those same skewed polls. After all, since 1990, you can buy a CD set of American voting records by street address, it's not rocket science to be able to 'algo' that into a 'poll' that skews whichever way the highest bidder's (Rodham) quants tell you to.
https://www.facebook.com/viralthread/videos/598130190359668/jo6pak @28: Thanks for the videos.Adalbrand | Nov 13, 2016 6:53:27 PM | 36On Tuesday a democratic site was taken down. This video was put up in it's place.
Strange and troubling. Seig heil anyone?
@likklemore #24:Adalbrand | Nov 13, 2016 7:08:31 PM | 37Glad you said that, and much better than I would have.
@somebody #22:
polls are used to manipulate campaigns.
This. There was a Wikiliks Podesta email in whdich Clinton operatives discussed oversampling certain groups to inflate the poll in her favor.
Demian is now known as Adalbrand .
Oh Lookie – "Media Polls" Show Trump Back On Top, Go Figure…Jen | Nov 13, 2016 7:12:20 PM | 38As if on cue, or something. All of a sudden, S.U.R.P.R.I.S.E,… a litany of polls released today show Donald Trump ahead in key battleground states (Ohio and Florida), and tied –or closer than the margin of error– in new national polls…. […]It was because I followed that right-wing blog that I ignored all polls other than the LA Times tracking poll. (I didn't know about the IBD/TIPP poll until after the election.)Remember what we stated on October 20th: […]
The real battle is the battle for your mind. The peak U.S. media false polling cycle is thankfully in the rear-view mirror.
Hmm ... what can I say that no-one else has already said except to observe that the polling and the corporate media reporting the polling statistics were in another parallel universe and the people supposedly being polled (and not some over-sampled group in Peoria, Iowa, who could predict exactly what questions would be asked and knew what answers to give) live on planet Earth?ToivoS | Nov 13, 2016 7:18:03 PM | 39I most certainly did not predict Trump would win. But I did question the polls. What I questioned a few weeks ago was the margin of victory for Hillary.voislav | Nov 13, 2016 7:23:32 PM | 40There were two big variables that the pollsters had to guess at. One was the voter turnout numbers for those precincts that had many working class people with a high school or less education level. As it turns out those people came out in higher numbers than they have in elections over the past two decades. The other was voter turnout for many precincts that supported Obama in 2008 and 2012. What happened here was many of those voters who did turn out voted for Trump, instead of the Democrat. There was a third uncertainty here that no on has yet figured out. That was those people who would never admit to a stranger that they were going to vote for Trump and simply lied to the pollster.
In any case those three uncertainties worked in directions that none of the pollsters really picked up on.
#29 Quadriadbigmango | Nov 13, 2016 7:23:48 PM | 41This is because most of the polls were weighting more Democratic (based on the 2012 election), which overestimated Clinton's support. For example, the Rasmussen poll, which traditionally weights more Republican, gave Clinton 1.7% lead, 44.8% to 43.1% (3% margin of error), so fairly close to the election results (47.3% to 47.8%).
So the difference between the poll and the actual result is 1.2% in favour of Trump (1.7% lead to Clinton in poll vs. 0.5% in the election). All are well within the error of the poll, so 1.2% difference between the election and the poll is well within the stated 3% error margin of the poll.
When you mention 6 sigma, you really don't really know what you are talking about. Typical polling error is 3 - 4% and the election result was within this error for most polls in all of the states. Standard deviation (sigma) that you mention is a random uncertainty associated with a measurement and it does not apply here. As I tried to convey, the errors in polling tend to be systematic, not random, because they are tied to weighting of the polls, not to the sample of the population as this is mostly corrected by the weighting. So because most of the MSM polls use similar weighting methodology based on the same historical data, they will all be off, there will be no random distribution of some for Trump, some for Clinton. Weighing based on different historical data skews the whole picture one way, it's not a random error. This is why pollster slap a relatively large 3 - 4% error on their polls, it is meant to cover any systematic bias of the weighting as well as random errors.
You assume public polls are conducted by impartial actors who wish to inform and illuminate..... your assumption is incorrect.Adalbrand | Nov 13, 2016 7:31:27 PM | 42@ToivoS #39:Bill Hicks | Nov 13, 2016 7:44:37 PM | 43those three uncertainties worked in directions that none of the pollsters really picked up on.
Have a loook at the LA Times tracking poll . It had Trump ahead by 3.2% on election day, which is close to the margin of error. The graph there is interesting, because dates of various events, such as the debates are marked. The poll figures moved in response to those events as one would expect.
Before the election, the people who do that poll said that they did best at predicting the 2012 election. Oh, in a post about the election's outcome, Alexander Dugin singled out that poll for praise.
I have a better idea--how about we stop the stupid polling altogether since there is only one poll that really matters? Then the media would have to focus on the issues rather than the horserace. Oh, the humanity!Quadriad | Nov 13, 2016 8:08:16 PM | 44I know exactly what I am talking about.Quadriad | Nov 13, 2016 8:12:56 PM | 45Hypothesis A - that it's all explainable by random distribution of their samples.
If you use Hypotethesis A, and then disprove it in it's own game (be it 3, or 6 sigma), then you have to suggest an alternative.
I don't know what the alternative is. I don't even claim I do. But you can more easily disprove the veracity that the polls could have mostly been non-biased by showing that hypothesis is unlikely to be RIGHT. That's where sigmas make absolute sense.
Nice try though, Voislave.
Furthermore, what you are proving here is that the POPULATION of ALL COMBINED polls has a mean that must be different from the POPULATION of all actual voters, not of disproving the polls one by one.MadMax2 | Nov 13, 2016 8:14:16 PM | 46I think you've totally ignored my point, you keep looking at individual polls as trees, I am looking at the poll forest and saying the entire forest is buggered if almost all polls erred on one side, regardless of their individual margins of error.
The New York Times recent admission that it writes the narrative first, then builds the story to suit says about everything for me regarding polls. 'Hey, my editor needs someone to come out and say something, can you say this...?' <-- Now, if that is standard practice in journalism at 'the paper of record', then skewing polls to suit a common agenda is a given, again in my opinion. This of course is great news for sites like MofA.Penelope | Nov 13, 2016 8:16:37 PM | 47Also impossible to capture The Don's campaign playing the electoral college system like an old mandolin, as it turns out. 306 Trump bts 232 Hillary it looks like in the wash up. That's old school work rate doing the job. Fair play. Great to see all the student debt laden brainwashed libtards out there doing there nut. They don't even know what a bullet they dodged + shite like the TPP is now dead. Some gratitude.
Hopefully in 2020 there are some more scientific polls like the USC Dornslife/LA Times poll, each having their own differing methodologies preferably. This should give the punters a better 'feel' for the electorate.
In other news...
Assange is being interviewed tomorrow by Swedush police (for the 2nd time I should add). There are and were no charges laid. I suspect their will be no charges brought tomorrow.
...so what happened...? Did The Rule of Law just...magically appear...?
The most extraordinary thing I learned about polls is that exit polls are altered as soon as the official election or primary vote is in-- to match it.Penelope | Nov 13, 2016 8:42:14 PM | 49https://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/tag/mathematical-proof-of-election-fraud/
2 heartstopping items:Julian | Nov 13, 2016 8:54:34 PM | 50
-- http://phibetaiota.net/2016/11/robert-steele-the-accidental-president-will-he-resign-the-closed-system-is-still-rigged-and-likely-to-remain-so/ Challenging Trumps legitimacy.
-- http://usdefensewatch.com/2016/11/putin-issues-international-arrest-warrant-for-george-soros-dead-or-alive/ This last-- like most overly dramatic news-- appears to be a scm but is widely dispersed across the web. Kind of curious. Of course I guess everybody knows that he's behind the protests in the US.Who is Trump speaking to?Adalbrand | Nov 13, 2016 8:55:25 PM | 51According to reports, the first leader Trump spoke to on the phone after his election victory was the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. Sisi congratulated him on the election victory, a spokesman for the Egyptian leader said.Ireland's government said the taoiseach, Enda Kenny, had a 10-minute call with Trump, and was invited to visit the White House on St Patrick's Day.
Mexico's president, Enrique Peńa Nieto, has said he and Trump agreed in their call to meet before Trump takes office, while Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was invited to the White House.
Other leaders to have a chat with Trump so far include the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe – they reportedly talked for 20 minutes and agreed to meet soon in New York – and South Korea's president, Park Geun-hye.
Australia's prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was reported to have chatted with Trump about security and trade in their call.
No surprises there.
It may be unfortunate, but I can see Trump & Erdogan getting along very well. Although, if they bring Putin into that triumvirate that could actually be very beneficial for the Middle East.
Notably absent
- Francois Hollande (GONE)
- Angela Merkel (GONE)
- Mark Rutte (GONE)
- Matteo Renzi (GOING?)
@MadMax2 #46:Concur with all your points. And yes, the timing of the Swedes finally deciding to interview Assange is funny.
I never thought that Hillary would become president, btw., from the moment she declared for 2016. Which is not to say that I was not concerned that the demonization of Trump might throw the election. We'll never know, but it is possible that Trump wouldn't have won without Wikileaks. And the two sets of leaks were very well timed.
To return to polls. It's not just most media polls that were off. The Clinton campaign's internal polls were off, too. They didn't have much doubt that they would win. (The same thing happened with Romney of course, but in their case, their internal polls differed from the media polls.) Apparently, they really did believe they have a firewall, with redundancies no less.
Clinton staffers: Arrogance from the DNC leadership cost Clinton the election
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Nov 13, 2016 | nypost.com
But Democrats had a simpler answer for why Clinton lost. As one Democratic strategist close to Clinton told The Post, it all came down to "one word: Comey." Too bad for Democrats there are zero electoral votes in the State of Denial. FBI Director James Comey didn't use a private e-mail server to conduct official State Department business and put 110 classified e-mails on that unsecured server. Comey didn't fail to turn over some 14,900 e-mails to the FBI after assuring Americans that "I turned over everything I was obligated to turn over."Comey didn't lie to the American people about Benghazi, publicly blaming the attacks on "inflammatory material posted on the Internet." Comey didn't tell Democratic voters he was against free-trade deals, but then tell Brazilian bankers that his dream was for "hemispheric . . . open trade and open borders."
Comey didn't have a foundation that accepted millions of dollars in donations from foreign governments during his tenure as secretary of state. He didn't give, as I wrote last month, "special treatment to Clinton Foundation donors after the Haiti quake, asking for them to be identified as 'FOBs' (friends of Bill Clinton) or 'WJC VIPs' (William Jefferson Clinton VIPs)."
Why did Hillary Clinton lose? Not because of Comey. She lost because exit polls showed that 54 percent of voters believe she is "corrupt."
To the elites in Washington, her corruption was apparently no big deal, at least not compared with their horror at the prospect of a Trump presidency. But Americans correctly saw her corruption as corrosive to our democracy.
This election was a popular repudiation of Clinton's corruption and deceit - and she owns that. But there is one person besides herself whom she can blame: President Obama. Because while Clinton may have lost to Donald Trump, it was Obama who created him.
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www.zerohedge.com
Meanwhile, Hillary lost not merely because she misread the "real" people, she decided to run a very divisive and nasty negative campaign, which has fueled the violence ever since. According to WikiLeaks emails from campaign John Podesta, Clinton colluded with the DNC and the media to raise what they thought would be the extreme right among Republicans to then make her the middle of the road to hide her agenda.
... ... ...
Clinton called this her "pied piper" strategy, that intentionally cultivated extreme right-wing presidential candidates and that would turn the Republicans away from their more moderate candidates. This enlisted mainstream media who then focused to Trump and raise him above all others assuming that would help Hillary for who would vote for Trump. This was a deliberate strategy all designed to propel Hillary to the White House.
The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee along with mainstream media all called for using far-right candidates "as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right." Clinton's camp insisted that Trump should be "elevated" to "leaders of the pack" and media outlets should be told to "take them seriously."If we look back on April 23, 2015, just two weeks after Hillary Clinton officially declared her presidential campaign, her staff sent out a message on straregy to manipulate the Republicans into selecting the worse candidate. They included this attachment a "memo for the DNC discussion."
The memo was addressed to the Democratic National Committee and stated bluntly, "the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field." Here we find that the real conspiracy was Clinton manipulating the Republicans. "Clearly most of what is contained in this memo is work the DNC is already doing. This exercise is intended to put those ideas to paper."
"Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate."
The Clinton strategy was all about manipulating the Republicans to nominate the worst candidate Clinton called for forcing "all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election."
It was not Putin trying to rig the elections, it was Hillary. Clinton saw the Republican field as crowded and she viewed as "positive" for her. "Many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right." Clinton then took the strategic position saying "we don't want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more 'Pied Piper' candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party."
Her manipulative strategy was to have the press build up Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz and Ben Carson. "We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to them seriously."
This conspiracy has emerged from the Podesta emails. It was Clinton conspiring with mainstream media to elevate Trump and then tear him down. We have to now look at all the media who endorsed Hillary as simply corrupt. Simultaneously, Hillary said that Bernie had to be ground down to the pulp. Further leaked emails showed how the Democratic National Committee sabotaged Sanders' presidential campaign. It was Hillary manipulating the entire media for her personal gain. She obviously did not want a fair election because she was too corrupt.
What is very clear putting all the emails together, the rise of Donald Trump was orchestrated by Hillary herself conspiring with mainstream media, and they they sought to burn him to the ground. Their strategy backfired and now this is why she has not come out to to speak against the violence she has manipulated and inspired.
This is by far the WORST campaign in history and it was all orchestrated by Hillary to be intentionally divisive for the nation all to win the presidency at all costs. She has torched the constitution and the country. No wonder Hillary could not go to the stage to thank her supporters. She never counted on them and saw the people as fools. The entire strategy was to take the White House with a manipulation of the entire election process. Just unbelievable. Any Democrat who is not angry at this is clearly just a biased fool. Wake up and smell the roses. You just got what you deserve.
Notveryamused -> Charles Wilson •Nov 12, 2016 9:12 PM
It's one thing to be ruthless & evil. It's another to be ruthless, evil and stupid. Brexit should have been a huge eye-opener for the elites that they should seek to field two establishment candidates as usual at any cost rather than risk elevating an outsider.
It's incredibly fortunate they were too dumb to realise that the former middle class and independents cognisant of NWO would create huge momentum for exactly those type of candidates & that this was absolutely the worst time in history to attempt that strategy. Lack of competition at the top of the food chain has made her ilk slow and out of touch. Evolution is a bitch.
847328_3527 -> nmewn •Nov 12, 2016 9:33 PM
That yootoob video of "When people laughed at the idea..." is excellent...a Must watch for all! Here is the yootoob link again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT0Rjc6jKCg
Automatic Choke -> 847328_3527 •Nov 12, 2016 9:34 PM
Personally, I find this hilarious. She schemes and connives to push forward the most "unelectable" republican, and that republican wins mostly because she vastly underestimates the dislike of Americans for her.
Could there be a more fitting slap in the face to someone of such enormous hubris and arrogance?
jcaz -> Automatic Choke •Nov 12, 2016 9:47 PM
Excellent article. Truly, the definition of "hubris" was Hillary during this election.
What she underestimated was the ability for most to see thru her true contempt of people. That's the bottom line of Hillary- she just sees herself as royalty, and we just got tired of seeing it again and again.
MalteseFalcon -> espirit •Nov 12, 2016 10:47 PM
Hillary Rodent fashions herself as some kind of leader who is a Christian (Methodist) and loves America ("Need to unify!!"). So let the Rodent get on TV and tell these bought and paid for rioters to stop. "Not in my name" should be the Rodent's plea.
<crickets>
She's a fraud.
Joe Davola -> MalteseFalcon •Nov 12, 2016 11:44 PM
It truly was the worst campaign in history (topping Mondale 84). If only they'd put half the effort into their campaign that they put into dirty tricks. Then again, from the tone of the leaked emails it is clear they realized she was the worst candidate ever.
They were so busy playing it like a parlor game, they forgot to actually provide real reasons to vote for her - beyond it was her turn.
This mirrors her naive approach to foreign policy of "create a controlled burn (Arab spring) and get rid of your enemy". Without realizing someone would move in to the void left afterwards. (I need to drink more - In whiskey, veritas). Or as in this case, the wind changes direction.
FreedomGuy -> Joe Davola •Nov 13, 2016 12:44 AM
It is interesting that there is no mention of any strategy to promote her ideas or positive qualities. In fact the "muddy the waters" statement shows they knew scandals would come up and they'd have to play defense.
It is never about how good they are. It is about how bad you/the other side is.
caconhma -> jcaz •Nov 12, 2016 10:31 PM
War is war. The goal is to win by destroying an opponent. Therefore, any actions and any strategy leading to a victory are totally justified!
Consequently, one cannot blame Hitlery for her actions. Hitlery has done the right things but Jewish arrogance that guided and executed her election campaign negated and destroyed all advantages she had. Remember how Hitlery called US working white men just a deplorable POS. Furthermore, her allies could easily falsify the voter counting process but again they were so arrogant and self confident that they fucked up themselves.
People, stop be so naive and stupid. The life is not fair to losers since only winners always write the history!Finally, if Trump will follow an advice to be good to everybody being a unifier then he will be destroyed. This is why he must continue the strategy that brought his the victory. One never can win follow a defensive strategy!
hardmedicine -> caconhma •Nov 13, 2016 3:46 AM
unfortunately, the MSM is continuing without a break in cadence their lock-step call for bipartisan! compromise! and let's be "REASONABLE" . DAMMIT. The time for reasonable is past.
If Trump puts in a lot of NEOCON insiders in his cabinet I say we need to hammer it again home that this is our last chance. If trump doesn't deliver the JOBS and Economic turnaround then the conservatives are GONE. We won't get another chance.
Grosvenor Pkwy -> Chris Dakota •Nov 13, 2016 6:29 AM
Long-term drug and alcohol abuse slowly destroys the brain. She was definitely smarter 20 years ago. "first we have to bring them to heel..."
VinceFostersGhost -> Chris Dakota •Nov 13, 2016 8:23 AM
for years the talk is that Hillary is a drunk.
Heard the same thing.......Benghazi......she was knocked out.
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Nov 13, 2016 | www.zerohedge.com
* * *Then there was ultraliberal Michael Moore, who in a facebook post urged to "Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative they wouldn't let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those same bloviators will now tell us we must "heal the divide" and "come together." They will pull more hooey like that out of their ass in the days to come. Turn them off."
Morning After To-Do List:
1. Take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people. They have failed us miserably.
2. Fire all pundits, predictors, pollsters and anyone else in the media who had a narrative they wouldn't let go of and refused to listen to or acknowledge what was really going on. Those same bloviators will now tell us we must "heal the divide" and "come together." They will pull more hooey like that out of their ass in the days to come. Turn them off.
3. Any Democratic member of Congress who didn't wake up this morning ready to fight, resist and obstruct in the way Republicans did against President Obama every day for eight full years must step out of the way and let those of us who know the score lead the way in stopping the meanness and the madness that's about to begin.
4. Everyone must stop saying they are "stunned" and "shocked". What you mean to say is that you were in a bubble and weren't paying attention to your fellow Americans and their despair. YEARS of being neglected by both parties, the anger and the need for revenge against the system only grew. Along came a TV star they liked whose plan was to destroy both parties and tell them all "You're fired!" Trump's victory is no surprise. He was never a joke. Treating him as one only strengthened him. He is both a creature and a creation of the media and the media will never own that.
5. You must say this sentence to everyone you meet today: "HILLARY CLINTON WON THE POPULAR VOTE!" The MAJORITY of our fellow Americans preferred Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. Period. Fact. If you woke up this morning thinking you live in an effed-up country, you don't. The majority of your fellow Americans wanted Hillary, not Trump. The only reason he's president is because of an arcane, insane 18th-century idea called the Electoral College. Until we change that, we'll continue to have presidents we didn't elect and didn't want. You live in a country where a majority of its citizens have said they believe there's climate change, they believe women should be paid the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don't want us invading countries, they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care system. None of that has changed. We live in a country where the majority agree with the "liberal" position. We just lack the liberal leadership to make that happen (see: #1 above).
* * *
There were countless more such examples of prominent liberals accusing the press of bias and propaganda long after the fact, even as the press itself refuses to admit any guilt, while itself blaming others, and so the circle continues to turn, and nothing changes in a world in which nobody knows what happens next now that the status quo has been crushed by the people.
Finally, speaking of Saturday Night Live sketches, we can't wait to see how the liberal "comedy" show - which just like the NYT existed in a world of its own throughout the presidential campaign - spins the election results tonight.
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www.theguardian.com
thetowncrier -> NathAldridge 4d ago
No shit, Sherlock. Sanders would have beaten Trump. We are living in extreme times, and in extreme times centrism and political 'triangulation' doesn't work.
This result will be repeated next year in France with the National Front. Mark my words. And when it does, France will vote to leave the EU and the house of cards will come crashing down.
You can thank the Democrats, a party that used to represent working people, for at least part of that. Their billionaire backers picked Clinton because she'd ensure their wealth would remain untouched. I wonder what they're feeling now?
Aaron Jackson -> NathAldridge 4d ago
How do you figure? Clinton won the Democratic primary by less than the margin of superdelegates. She had a MASSIVE lead in funding, institutional support, and (at the least) insider bias--though it was likely more than that, given that nearly every single election anomaly in that primary bounced her way.
The DNC intentionally limited the debates and scheduled those they did have for off times to try to limit the damage Sanders could do to Clinton, and big media refused to cover Bernie Sanders except in the context of Clinton.
And even with all of that, Sanders pulled within 300 delegates of winning the Democratic Nomination by working through a grassroots, positive campaign. The momentum was entirely on his side, too! And national polls showed him performing MUCH better against Trump than Clinton. And, of course, he had no scandals (real or imagined) to leverage.
The party elites--the superdelegates--committed to Clinton from the beginning. They decided it was her turn. And despite all the evidence showing they were supporting a weak, vulnerable, and heavily disliked candidate, they stuck with it anyway. This Trump presidency, and the Republican sweep in the House and Senate, is entirely on the shoulders of 300 insider Democrats.
NathAldridge 4d agoThe Guardian in a nutshell!
Clinton's supporters among the media didn't help much, either. It always struck me as strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial and opinion pages of the nation's papers, but it was the quality of the media's enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here's what it consisted of:
- Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
- Her scandals weren't real.
- The economy was doing well / America was already great.
- Working-class people weren't supporting Trump. And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.
dynamic22 4d ago
"But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine."
You said everything really.
Watchman80 -> dynamic22 4d ago
Yup.
Also, see this. Note the date (and the imagined Trump speech)
Choller21 4d agoMaybe it's time to consider whether there's something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.
I couldn't have put it better. I could have put it with more swear words in though.
BigBlue80 4d ago
Maybe there is a bright side to a Trump victory. After all, there was a reason that tens of millions of good people voted for him yesterday, and maybe he will live up to their high regard for him.
If you assume that election victory (not even a majority as apparently Clinton will win the popular vote) legitmises everything, you are right. But if you believe that there are western values that should not be sacrificed than you are wrong. Eventually, this will be the end of democracy - it will kill itself by electing a fascist. I happened before and it looks ever more likely. The you US with ist overbearing nationalism, its leader-orientation and glorification of the military was always close to fascism, but now it might have taken the final leap into the abyss.
atuocool 4d ago
John Hunter 4d ago"[Neo]Liberals" are a type of conservative who never convince me of the sincerity of their "progressive" values. What was progressive about Hillary? What would she have actually done for the poor? How would she have moved America away from being a corporate plutocracy? We all know the answer is nothing. Trump is a nightmare, but he represents a bizarre, retrograde change while Clinton represented a vacuous status quo.
with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station
Correct, it is censorship and suppression of contrary opinion and enormously biased towards "The Chosen One"Once again it proves that the Guardian is against the tide of History.
It is not bad to be contrarian or representing an alternative opinion or "voice" however provided you still maintain some sense of integrity and journalistic professionalism, providing content, news and information that is fair, balanced without indulging in gratuitous character assassination, presenting controversial issues of public importance in a manner that is honest, equitable, and balanced.
The Guardian during the American election as with Brexit and many other controversial issues has consistently aligned itself with policies and opinion that many would consider left-wing or liberal yet is neither as the viewpoints they support betrays the liberty and freedom of the ordinary citizen.
As I said before the election regardless who win or lose the media has already lost by showing its hand and exposed itself as not a true independent source of news and information, but pursuing definite agendas and siding with corporate news media's opinions and politics.
According to the Guardian's own view liberalism will have to be remade in a post-liberal age. It is their own peculiar set of values they believe that is important and not the very principles the left originally defended. Pursuing a certain "metropolitan liberal creed".
An metropolitan liberal elite who believe they are more educated, more intelligent and talented, more enlightened, more able to comprehend what society needs than the slow, slobs, the wasters and good for nothings with their prejudices, that do not know what is good for them.
Their brand of Liberalism has been the complete antithesis of allowing people to take control of their lives. It has been a dictatorial imposition of the beliefs of the least liberal nature.
Equating the tendencies of so-called "social justice warriors" and so-called "identity politics" and equating them somehow with liberalism you're a long way from the truth have little to do with liberalism and no, that's not "left" either.
The establishment in the mainstream media believe they are economically liberals - though privately they look more kindly on monopolies than old school liberals would have. Yet these "liberals" want to happily embrace Brussels' legalistic regime of rules that range from the petty and impractical to a punitive and autocratic dictatorship.
Classical liberalism is a political ideology and a branch of liberalism which advocates civil liberties and political freedom with representative democracy under the rule of law and emphasizes economic freedom.
It is no secret what the problem is, lack of jobs, lack of opportunities, people who feel they have no future or rights in their own country anymore.
Ask yourself is what you identify with or support contributing towards a more peaceful, harmonious society where all have a sense of having a place and a future in their own country where they feel they fit in and contribute towards a more safe, secure and prosperous society?
Jerome Fryer John Hunter 4d ago 14 15
An metropolitan liberal elite who believe they are more educated, more intelligent and talented, more enlightened, more able to comprehend what society needs than the slow, slobs, the wasters and good for nothings with their prejudices, that do not know what is good for them.
This is not a new problem. The social elites (self-appointed) of all political persuasions are always bemoaning the stupidity of the plebs in not bowing to their superior understanding of all things. That this unfounded hubris is an amazing exemplar of denial of reality (who just won this election, for example) doesn't seem able to take root in the bubble of acceptable thought in their minds. How could they possibly be talking out of their bottom when it comes to damn near everything? (All evidence aside.)
We need the voice of the 'common people' to be heard, without being filtered by the elites. Fake democracy is not going to work -- we'll end up with a bigger fiasco, such as Jamie Dimon vs Kim Kardashian in the next US Presidential contest. Way past time for those in power to wake up to the fact that they're not in control, and real change that involves the great unwashed in the process is necessary. Trump is one dumb guy, but he has managed to figure out how to use this frustration to get his misogynist, racist, backside into the chair in the Oval Office.
Wise up, 'smart people'. Reply Share Share on Facebook Facebook Share on Twitter Twitter | Pick Report _jhfta_ Jerome Fryer 4d ago 10 11
I give you: Boaty McBoatface. trp981 , 9 Nov 2016 11:2>We need the voice of the 'common people' to be heard, without being filtered by the elites.
Concluding Unscientific Postscripts (*)rasnip , 9 Nov 2016 11:2>- Election of Trump is not just another routine changing of the guards in the US two-party system (although it is that too). This is a significant deviation in the business-as-usual model of politics, and there will be substantial repercussions that will explicitly manifest themselves somewhere down the line.
- The Founding Dudes and the Framers of the US Constitution had set up the system so as to preclude the possibility of ascendance of someone like Trump.
- The Founding Dudes and the Framers of the US Constitution had set up the system so as to eventually make possible the ascendance of someone like Trump.
- Sanders was right. That having had had been said, he would have still lost to Drumpf if he were the D's nominee instead of HRC.
- That is because RealAmerica_a spoke more vocally this time around, overwhelming the voice of RealAmerica_b.
- Judging by geographical size alone, RealAmerica_a is Real America.
- It is simply unimaginable that the enlightened citizenry will elect someone as destructive and unqualified as Reagan in 1980. Such a possibility is not conceivable in any logical space, and even fiction writers are wary to contemplate such an impossibility.
- Election of Reagan is not just another routine changing of the guards in the US two-party system (although it is that too). This is a significant deviation in the business-as-usual model of politics, and there will be substantial repercussions that will explicitly manifest themselves somewhere down the line.
- Trump's victory is a repeat of the interplay of the socioeconomic forces that made Dubya's presidency possible in 2000. Eight more years of this worldview and we will have another Obama-type candidacy afterwards to clean up the mess and make the world safe again for the staggering-but-still-dominant neoliberal order.
- People will be just too exhausted after eight years of Trump's presidency, and they will be so relieved after the election of the next Obama-type president as to retreat to their homes and let the new savior continue cuddling the big economic players and attempting to reach a Grand Bargain with the Republicans to further erode the threadbare social safety net holding up the people, of course for the good of the people themselves and in the name of Serious Politics.
-The dominant position in our society will continue to be the generalization of Alan Grayson's observation: Don't fall down, if you do disappear quickly.
- Setting aside the status quo status of Clinton's policy prescriptions (she a competent steward of the Washington Consensus), Trump's victory also signals the provisional victory of the manly men of RealAmerica_a (and the women who love them) over women (and minorities, and the LGBT, and immigrants, and etc).
- The same way that most people don't know or care about the wavelengths associated with colors, they don't know or care about the underlying forces affecting their lives as long as the politicians put on a good Reality TV show and pull effectively at their heartstrings.
- In other words, F science, F reality.
- In other words, long live Realty TV, the rule of Kardashians, the Apprentice, WWE/WWF , etc. Constant exposure to these things matter.
- Constant exposure to these things don't matter.- Tomorrow the Sun will come up as before, and the Earth will go around it at a steady pace as before, and the already enfeebled welfare state will continue to fray as before, and millions of US citizens will continue their steady fall into precariousness as before (especially Trump supporters in RealAmerica_a), and millions will continue to lose steady jobs and be pushed into the the gig economy, and the 1% will continue raking in the loot as before under the benevolent gaze of their new leader.
- If HRC had won, all above would still occur, but probably at a lower rate (except for the Sun and Earth thing).
- Drumpf was the Smoker to HRC's Atoller .
(*) Yesyes, I know.
I feel lots of parallels can be drawn with brexit, particularly the points made at the end. amazingly people dont like being insulted and talked down to by party elites, the gop base has been totally transformed by trumps campaign.spotthelemon usini , 9 Nov 2016 11:4>that said has anyone else noticed that trump supporters only ever say 'hes going to do so much for us' and trump says we are going to reopen the mines/factories/get a better deal but never said how. he has promised unicorns and rainbows to people dealt a shit hand by the economic changes of the last 30 years.
The political class amongst US liberals are neo-liberalsMusicismath usini , 9 Nov 2016 11:5>Neoliberalism from Reagan to [Bill] Clinton .
written in 1998 the review of this book ends with
" Michael Meeropol's damning indictment of the economic direction of the Clinton presidency demonstrates that nowhere is the need for a new movement more pressing than in the United States".Well Bush & Obama & Hillary, had she been elected, were continuations of that economic direction. If America has needed a new movement to win since 1999 then I guess they got really desperate which is why they voted for something as bad as Trump. Yes , the liberals or more specifically neo-liberals an be held responsible
Frank has been making exactly this point since 1997. Others worth reading on this issue include Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph L. Reed, Jr.Aboutface , 9 Nov 2016 11:3>Unfortunately, in a lot of fora where this message sorely needs to be heard right now, this article would be summarily dismissed on the basis that Frank used the word "shrill," which is out of bounds in liberal discourse. Which of course just illustrates Frank's point.
The DNC put President Trump into the White House. The DNC, fixated on the anointed, untouchable HRC, lost its moral compass and the good work of Bernie and Warren, now amounts to a big fat ZERO.Pinback71 , 9 Nov 2016 11:3>
Laughable, how out of touch - meaningless motherhood cliches cannot pay the bills.It is a case in point that the MSM have completely lost touch with a population that often relies on the internet for its news. In the old days, the newspaper that was closest to your political viewpoint was delivered to your door as your primary source of information, now every news outlet, blog and forum in the world is delivered directly to your tablet.Ummmmm , 9 Nov 2016 11:3>
The media, like the Government has considerably less influence than a decade or two ago.Good article and, as one poster put it, encapsulates the Guardian's editorial line in a nutshell.Omoikani , 9 Nov 2016 11:3>The FT seems to be to the left of this paper these days, forced to be more hard nosed about the world. This from its columnist Wolfgang Munchenau some days ago:
"What led the centre-left on to such a self-destructive path? The answer is a combination of the following: a false belief that elections are won from the centre; the lure of ministerial limousines; an inferiority complex about not being able to run "responsible fiscal policies"; and a belief that voters of the left have nowhere else to go. .. The main issue is not whether a Keynesian policy response would be economically correct. The more important point is that if the centre-left does not offer it, the populists will. Unless the centre-left returns to its Keynesian roots, I think there is a good chance that the politics of insurrection will succeed."
https://www.ft.com/content/dba252f8-a29c-11e6-82c3-4351ce86813fSame trends at play in UK, US and Europe. Any lessons to learn?
Excellent article. Perhaps the Guardian needs to do a whole lot of soul-searching.Persianwar , 9 Nov 2016 11:3>The one thing left out of the article is what Michael Moore said, which is really worth reading in full , but the nub of which is the following:
You live here in Ohio, you know what I'm talking about. Whether Trump means it or not, is kind of irrelevant because he's saying the things to people who are hurting, and that's why every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves Trump. He is the human molotov cocktail that they've been waiting for. The human hand grande that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.
MacWolf , 9 Nov 2016 11:3>the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station.
That's a very accurate summary. The first step to winning next time is to understand why you lost this time. The establishment view was that people were going to get Hillary Clinton whether they liked it or not. Next time try listening to people who are angry that their pay has fallen in real terms for 10 years. Try listening to people whose views you disagree with rather than 'no platform' them lest your delicate sensibilities be offended.
The list of celebrities and pundits and surrogates taking his side on the campaign trail was extremely short.dizzyalien MacWolf , 9 Nov 2016 11:4>I often wonder is having a celebrity endourse you counter productive. I saw many celebs appear on TV and social media telling people they shouldn't vote for Trump. Some went as far as to call people who might vote for Trump idiots. How many people got fed up with rich, famous people telling them how they should vote? If you're someone sitting in America's rust belt, no job or low paid crap job, being told by someone you think probably owns a Hollywood mansion and does very little work, would you not feel a little resentful being told by them how to vote? Wouldn't you take a dislike to a candidate who appears on stage with these celebs and yet you feel ignores you? Just a thought.
Rights come with responsibilities.SqueakEMouse MacWolf , 9 Nov 2016 12:0>If you have the right to vote, the responsibility is to think through the implications of using that vote for X or Y candidate, to work out for yourself what will happen to you, your family, your community and your country if you vote for X or Y.
If you vote for Y because you feel "resentful" that someone is using their freedom of speech to urge voting for X rather than Y - perhaps you shouldn't really be voting at all. Just a thought.
More than just an odd thought my friend. The sight of a procession of wealthy, smug and self entitled celebs, often utter hypocrites, expecting to deliver their Facebook followers to a politician is nauseating and angers more than a few. Few of these celebs are famous for their brains so being called an idiot by a halfwit with money hardly endears them. But still society is in thrall to the concept of celebrity following. It begs the question of what all these followers are actually following. Perhaps Lady Gaga et al have confused the pathological need for an entertainment fix with an adoration of their thoughts and outlook.MatthewRendall 4d agoKilling off the neo-liberal virus in the Democratic Party would be a start, but won't be enough, if the Democrats simply put the American equivalents of Jeremy Corbyn in its place. What's desperately needed here are fresh ideas--something analogous to the Keynesian ideas that gave intellectual underpinning to the New Deal.
MaoriSideStep , 9 Nov 2016 11:4>The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn't all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn't accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it's time to consider whether there's something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.
I think this is a very succinct assessment and goes most of the way to explaining this result, and the Brexit result too. People don't want to be lectured, they want to be listened to (yes, even if you think they're wrong).
'Liberals' created the grounds for Brexit too.BayOfGiggs MaoriSideStep , 9 Nov 2016 11:4>You see, their sneering attitude to the British working class, their name-calling, their bogus judgements about the working class for not wanting any more of their rights and opportunities taken away from them.
The 'liberals' are hated as much as the toffs. Brexit was a great example of the bile and hatred the 'liberals' spew out at the disadvantaged working class.
It wasn't the 'liberals' housing and schools, communities and healthcare, employment rights and opportunities that was being eroded though was it? No. But that didn't stop the 'liberals' branding the working class as 'racists' and 'stupid' and 'blind' did it.
Maybe you now can see yourself, on this poxy 'liberal' website and see how YOU have created a situation where the working class want ANYTHING other than more of your poison.
Look at the people bleating about Brexit: the 'liberals', the politicians, the bankers, big business, the judges...my goodness, doesn't that tell a story of the haves and have nots. All the bleaters are the scum that have never had the working class' best interests in mind and yet you think we, the working class, should take heed of their fatuous, aquisitive, vile, whimpers? Really?
It's only just beginning. Toodle pip.
Designcycle MaoriSideStep , 9 Nov 2016 12:0>The 'liberals' are hated as much as the toffs.
Why you think you'll get a great deal from....
Multi-Billionaire Media Barons controlling the news on both sides of the Atlantic (the same Baron in the case of Murdoch) and they in turn backed by the Trillionaire old and true establishment who are the exact same families as a hundred years ago and hundreds of years before that in many cases.
....baffles me however.
Very well written and I agree to a large extent - the problem is.. are people like Trump and blood Boris Johnson going to be any more cognisant of the lives and problems of the working class than the liberals? And are they likely to do anything about those problems unless they simultaneously line their own pockets? If, and it's a very big if, the interests of the working class and the interests of Trump et al align somehow then there is a silver lining. If not, then the best we can hope for is that liberals start to reconnect with the people they purport to represent.westcoaster Designcycle , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>Omoikani , 9 Nov 2016 11:4>the problem is.. are people like Trump and blood Boris Johnson going to be any more cognisant of the lives and problems of the working class than the liberals?
No. But maybe, just maybe, the 'left-wing' parties will wake and remember what they are supposed to be for.Here's the other thing. Clinton and her mates at the New York Times and the Guardian are always lecturing us on the need to be compassionate and welcoming towards refugees from faraway places who would like to come and live among us, but there's never a moment of compassion for the people who are already here and suffering miserably on the margins of our already unequal societies - the unemployed and badly employed, the badly housed and homeless, those working sixty hours a week on the minimum wage for some crappy agency. So, guess what. That's why people are voting for stuff like Brexit and Trump.Voltaire21 , 9 Nov 2016 11:4>If you lot in the metropolitan elite can't see this then you are doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes.
Just like Silvio Berlusconi, Trumps opponents were incapable to escape the trap of trying to sling shit at a candidate made out of teflon.hashtagthat Voltaire21 , 9 Nov 2016 11:5>The Clinton camp tried to fight a war in the trenches...but Trump feeds of negativity, they should have learnt early that nothing was too outrageous or controversial to tarnish him.
The closest they got was the misogyny accusations and even they didn't stick. Just like Berlusconi, Trump the lover of pageantry and beautiful women was being portrayed as a woman hater but he cleverly made it sound like he was hater of feminists instead of women.
The problem with Clinton is that she tried to play the integrity card but that was easily debunked by Trump with email gate.
"The Clinton camp tried to fight a war in the trenches.."finnja , 9 Nov 2016 11:4>Very apt, considering she's a warmonger.
The voice of sanity. Thank you, Mr. Frank.Geoff Conway , 9 Nov 2016 11:5>
The Democratic Establishment didn't give a hoot about what Bernie had to say, because his presidency would not have served their ambitions. They're more interested in getting nice jobs at Goldman Sachs than controlling the finance industry. And their sons and daughters will not fight in all the wars Clinton&Co see as great business opportunity.
The Dem establishment has failed the people, and now we all reep the whirlwind.I agree with Frank's analysis though not his use of the word 'liberal' which has confusingly different meanings. I think the same analysis could be used to explain Brexit.shooglebunny forkintheroad , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>The problem is a political class which wishes to maintain the status quo of a neo-liberal, globalised economy. For 35 years this economy has redistributed wealth from the poor to the rich and massively damaged the environment. It has thus disadvantaged the great majority of the people in the USA, the UK and indeed people across the world. People are quite reasonably fed up with the lies behind this 'trickle-down' economics. They are angry and want something different. The vacuum created by the failure of the left to recognise this, and come up with a new solution, has resulted in Trump, UKIP, Marine LePen etc.
No. I really think liberals have been their own worst enemies during this election.NathAldridge , 9 Nov 2016 11:5>They have treated ordinary white Americans as if they are shit, spoken about them in ways that should make them hang their heads in shame and behaved as if they are living in a oligarchy where they can call the shots instead of a democracy and now they are paying the price.
You can only kick a dog so many times before it turns around and bites you.
I would also question the term"liberals" to describe people who are happy seeing jobs moved offshore, causing unemployment at home and slave labour conditions abroad; encouraging mass immigration to bring wages down and create a powerless and easily exploitable servant class and globalisation that provides them with a luxury lifestyle on the cheap while making it harder for just about everyone else.
The only "liberal" thing about these people is their attitudes towards trivial personal issues like sexuality and lifestyle choices.
Wise words from Frank - I hope the Guardian opinionators are made to read itCraig Ross , 9 Nov 2016 11:5>Clinton's supporters among the media didn't help much, either. It always struck me as strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial and opinion pages of the nation's papers, but it was the quality of the media's enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here's what it consisted of:
Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
Her scandals weren't real.
The economy was doing well / America was already great.
Working-class people weren't supporting Trump.
And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.I hope all the Democratic Party insiders who rigged the primary elections are happy now.SixHeads 4d agoAbsolutely right. And I'm willing to wager the liberal response to this will be to double down on the identity politics, double down on the victimhood narratives, double down on the march toward globalism, and double down on the cries for open borders and ever-increasing levels of immigration. They simply never learn.
It's very clear what happened this morning. Trump won because he picked up the white working class vote in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio, all of which had previously voted for Obama in both 2008 and 2012. The people in these states didn't magically become racist over the past four years. They saw a candidate (Clinton) who represented "business as usual", and they rejected her.
Excellent article. Summarises both Brexit as well as Trump's victory.Dustbowler , 9 Nov 2016 11:5>The stats are showing that Trump polled higher amongst African and Hispanic Americans. I am not surprised. The Democrats, like the UK Labour party, like to think they OWN ethnic voters and they are merely another 'special interest' group alongside women, gays, etc. They don't and us ethnic voters have the same concerns as any other working or middle class voters. And NO ONE appreciates being told they are wrong, racist and unintelligent.
This shows Social liberialism is dead and rotten. Well past its used by date, time to chuck it out. It went off when supposed social justice warriors got into business with big business and fickle finance.
The elites may be well educated but that they couldn't even bare to bring themselves to understand the perspectives of another reveals how broadminded they really are - the journalists, academics etc. They believed in democracy where only one way of thinking and the status quo could be permitted to flourish. This is the most intelligent article to capture the social change that far too many liberals are denying. How are they going deal with reality, ie. Are the majority of Americans and British really racists? The greatest irony is this article is published within the vanguard of what ordinary people are democratically retaliating against.
When you reach rock bottom the only way is to look up. The problem for the Liberalism of the Democratic Party of the last three decades is that it has become a social scientific morality of the well connected and completely unable to deal with the naked populism of Trump let alone the half baked morass of crony capitalism of George Bush.George Pratt , 9 Nov 2016 11:5>
Lets be opportunistic. This gives it a chance to wipe the slate clean and at the very least rid themselves of the influence of the Clintons who from the removal of Glass-Steagal Act demonstrated their only concerns were with the needs of the Super Rich rather than the majority of the population. Unfortunately you have that feeling that they are not even capable of doing that."Trump... a folly so bewildering, an incompetence so profound ..."babyboomer1957 , 9 Nov 2016 11:5>Har, har, har, the foolish and incompetent Trump is now president elect and you are a wise and competent journalist who foresaw the future clearly.
Maybe you're the foolish incompetent, not Trump. Maybe you should examine the foolish certainty which made you write your Guardian article headlined "With Trump certain to lose, you can forget about a progressive Clinton" and many others based on foolish and incompetent assumptions, reasoning and conclusions
Maybe you and all the rest of the useful idiots on the left should examine all of your convictions about the world. You might discover how often you have been hoodwinked by your own folly into believing trash like Trump will lose to Hillary, AGW is a real problem which can be corrected by funneling trillions to crony capitalist alternative energy companies, fracking is dangerous and the unlimited immigration of millions of young, able bodied, violent, low IQ men is a good thing.
Hillary can console herself with a new job at Goldman Sachs, rather like Barosso, Global ambassador sounds nice.notacarboncopy babyboomer1957 , 9 Nov 2016 12:0>And that is precisely a big part of why she lost.jennyjl90 , 9 Nov 2016 11:5>People are sick of that merry-go-round, proof of the cabal that rules over us.
Trump will achieve nothing of what he's said he wants to do. Reversing the 'reverse colonisation' of the white western world will fail, especially in the USA where, after all, the Afro-black population didn't ask to move to in the first place (though I'll bet tend dollars dollars not a single Afro-black American would opt for emigrating back to Africa, however much they complain about racial prejudice in the USA - the financial advantages of living in the developed world are FAR too valuable for that!).queequeg7 , 9 Nov 2016 12:0>As for the Hispanics, I doubt even a wall would stop them. The mass population of Central and South America is far, far greater than that of 'white western America' and their third world economics keep the USA and the developed world a desperate magnet for them (and I can't blame them - I'd fight tooth and nail to get in to the rich west as well!)
Nope, the Trump victory is a sad, hopeless rearguard action against the triumph of twenty-first century 'reverse colonisation' and that is that. The white western world is finished - the only question is, can it 'westernise' the immigrant population in time to save the developed world, or are we doomed to another Dark Ages of Global Third Worldism? (Maybe China will take over as Islam did post Roman Empire, while Europe went savage...)
White Western World - it's game over. Accept it.
When you separate identity politics - race and gender - from inequality and class, which is what Obama and Clinton both did, you end up with Donald Trump moving into the White House ......queequeg7 Joelee73 , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>The liberal argument has always been about the equality to exploit not an end to exploitation. It was at the heart of New Labour as well as Obama/Clinton Democrats ...tedthetopcat queequeg7 , 9 Nov 2016 12:2>For the last 30 odd years the liberal left have claimed class no longer mattered. Now the "white" working class have twice given them a kicking in 2016. When you're at the bottom class really matters!MereMortal , 9 Nov 2016 12:0>callaspodeaspode , 9 Nov 2016 12:0>And so Democratic leaders made Hillary their candidate even though they knew about her closeness to the banks, her fondness for war, and her unique vulnerability on the trade issue – each of which Trump exploited to the fullest.
I really like Thomas Frank, but I wish in this diatribe that he wouldn't cheapen the countless (because the Americans don't count them) who have paid the price for Hillary's 'fondness for war' by referring to it like that, in passing, as if it was a fondness for muffins.
I wish that he had a bit more righteous fury about how the crazed neocon warmongers who effectively rule America and for whom Hillary was the latest acceptable face, with her almost total sense of entitlement, based on the fact that she was a woman, acted like she was heading for a coronation.
Yes it would be great if a woman had been elected president, I can think of at least two others one running, and one not, but doesn't even the most basic tenet of critical thinking require us to ask searching questions, about the specific woman ?He has run one of the lousiest presidential campaigns ever. In saying so I am not referring to his much-criticized business practices or his vulgar remarks about women. I mean this in a purely technical sense: this man fractured his own party.Designcycle , 9 Nov 2016 12:0>But did he really 'fracture' his own party? From the superficial point of view, one might have thought so. Many Democrats hope so.
But I'll suggest this. Anybody who is holding out the faint hope that he will work badly with the GOP in Congress is going to be very disappointed. He's going to put his signature to virtually everything they want. They're going to have a lot of fun together.
Even stuff which directly contradicts what he ran on and which upset many in the Republican establishment. I'm thinking foreign policy and trade agreements.And those in movement conservatism who didn't like him, like Glenn Beck and Erick Erickson? Watch them do a 180 over the next six months.
I'll bet on it.
Excellent article, about six months late, but hopefully not too late for liberals everywhere to wake up to the idea that if you claim to want to help improve the lives of the working class you better listen to them first, and connect with them second. I always thought laughing and sneering at Trump and particularly his supporters was never going to work. And sure enough it didn't. Nobody likes being patronised.fragglerokk , 9 Nov 2016 12:0>Sanders would have breezed it.Franz Habsburg fragglerokk , 9 Nov 2016 12:0>The Democrats ultimatey feared change
The Republicans didn't.
Sometimes you've got to have the courage to move beyond a rotting status quo and into a brave new world. If you don't you leave the door open for something potentially much much worse to take that opportunity.
How about doing a piece on how the press keep getting it wrong all the time, how you keep misjudging the mood of the people, the zeitgeist, how afraid you are of change and how as a result you keep siding with the establishment when the vast majority of people are fed up with its incessant inaction and bullshit?
Youre letting the fascists in through the open door because youre too afraid to give up your priviledges and go towards healthy change. You deserve what youre going to get because you spent too much time on here waffling bullshit and not enough time on the streets listening to what people want. Total cognitive dissonance. Social media is no good for assessing the mood of the people, its for pussy cat photos and selfies.Would have? He could not even beat Clinton in the primaries! Americans overthrow democratic socialist governments, they don't elect them.edhemingway fragglerokk , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>The republicans feared change, but winning was more important to them. As incongruous as it may seem, a billionaire businessman reached out to voters disenfranchised by some 30 years of partisan parlour games. Maybe it'll dawn on the Democrats who they should be reaching out to and maybe it'll dawn on the Republicans that there's more to being a politician than banging on about God and being against abortion.Steve Giess , 9 Nov 2016 12:0>I don't like the guy and find some of his views abhorrent and would even have preferred HC, but... but... this may be a wake up call for politics in America. Not sure it will be because after Brexit, the finger was pointed at the London middle classes and older voters whereas the strength of the vote came from the post-industrial heartland destroyed by Thatcher and virtually ignored by both parties ever since. Still, we'll see.
"With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. "MustaphaMondeo Steve Giess , 9 Nov 2016 12:2>Spot on analysis.
Let the soul-searching amongst the mainstream journalistic elites begin.People have rspecially started to notice the "with nuance and all contrary views deleted" part. That is part of the problem and part of the reason Trump got elected as a sort of collective middle finger to the establishment by ordinary people who are sick of being told what to think and how to think by unelected elites whose job it is supposed to be to report the FACTS, and not to dictate what people are allowed to say or think. Because as a great person once said "Facts are sacred." And as JS Mill said in his famous essay 'On Liberty' - we should not censor unpopular views because even though the unpopular view may be incorrect we may come to a better understanding of why our own view is correct by seeing its collision with error. (Quite apart from the fact that the unpopular view is not always correct and by suppressing it we may never know the truth.)
I hope the mainstream media learn from this disaster and start living up to the ideals of the intellectual founders of our liberal democracies such as JS Mill who would no doubt be appalled at the lerhaps well intentioned but counterproductive censorsgip of views which run counter to that of the prevailing orthodoxy.
It's because they believe we are stupid. The intellectual snobbery of the oxbridge set, think they are better than us. Little suspecting that most of us can't be arsed with that shite.AlpineJoe 4d agoI blame education. It's turned their heads.
The thing that keeps coming back to me with this election, as with Brexit, was the established candidates ignoring what people were saying. In Brexit, the remain side utterly ignored immigration, whilst the leave side focused on it. I don't think the remain side realised that immigration wasn't just conjured up by Daily Mail headlines but was a genuine issue for many people.
In the US, Trump spoke openly about jobs; bringing them back and preventing outsourcing. Looking again at trade deals to make sure American jobs were protected. Clinton's team ignored this.
Take heed for the future, politicians. Listen to what people actually say, not just the bits they say that you agree with.
Stillgrizzly AlpineJoe , 9 Nov 2016 12:0>
Indeed, that's the problem, a narrow political elite expecting the population to vote as they think, rather than as the population think. The disconnect between the consensus and the politicians is wide, the left in particular withdraws to the safety of it's narrow agenda when threatened leaving the centre wide open.Louis Raine , 9 Nov 2016 12:0>"Cold War propaganda station. Here's what it consisted of:SlumVictim , 9 Nov 2016 12:0>- Hillary was virtually without flaws.
- She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
- Her scandals weren't real.
- The economy was doing well / America was already great.
- Working-class people weren't supporting Trump.
- If they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only
conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate."Funny how all of these points were constantly touted in the Guardian... oh the ironny
The neoliberals weren't listening and probably still aren't listening. They will be blaming the white working class rednecks but there isn't enough of white working class rednecks to cause this upset. Professional neoliberal policians have neither the insight nor the intelligence to figure out they are the problem, they alienated the people they ignored while looking after the rich.Inversnaid SlumVictim , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>We see the same problem in the Labour Party here. The neoliberal Blairites spent 13 years using identity politics as a way to pretend to be radical while showing utter contempt for the white (and black) working class. When they lost two elections and Scotland, they blamed the left, as though no one could reject neoliberalism. Sorry professional neoliberal politicians, your days of your front trotters in the trough are almost up, you are being rejected and anyone but you seems to be the preference.
You, Sir or Madam, are a genius. Your analysis - like the analysis of the article - is spot on and your prose is punchy, concise and grammatically correct. You should be pick of the day.SlumVictim , 9 Nov 2016 12:0>The neoliberals weren't listening and probably still aren't listening. They will be blaming the white working class rednecks but there isn't enough of white working class rednecks to cause this upset. Professional neoliberal policians have neither the insight nor the intelligence to figure out they are the problem, they alienated the people they ignored while looking after the rich.Inversnaid SlumVictim , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>We see the same problem in the Labour Party here. The neoliberal Blairites spent 13 years using identity politics as a way to pretend to be radical while showing utter contempt for the white (and black) working class. When they lost two elections and Scotland, they blamed the left, as though no one could reject neoliberalism. Sorry professional neoliberal politicians, your days of your front trotters in the trough are almost up, you are being rejected and anyone but you seems to be the preference.
You, Sir or Madam, are a genius. Your analysis - like the analysis of the article - is spot on and your prose is punchy, concise and grammatically correct. You should be pick of the day.Spacebanj0 , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>Very interesting, and striking, parallels with Brexit. A disaffected majority, who don't believe they are listened to, rally round people who speak their language, engage with their fears and concerns and give them easy solutions to difficult problems.catherine Spacebanj0 , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>Both decisions are tragically wrong, in my view, but its clear there is a huge disconnect between those on the left (notional or otherwise) and their usual target voters.
The description of the Democrats is reminding me of New Labour...iruka , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>Absolutely spot on. And broadly applicable right across the western world. It wasn't Hillary the personality, or Hillary the crook, or Hillary the incompetent who lost the election.Musicismath , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>It was the Hillary the archetypal representative of the smug 'n' shabby liberal stitch-up that's done us all over, basking in its meritocratic delusions, and raising all the ladders (and greasing the sides) to the lifeboats in which those delusions were acted out to delusional acclaim...
...even as it was busy handing the world over first (greedily) to transnational capitalism and now (stupidly) to the marauding squads of pinhead fascists that'll be everywhere in the US within weeks, maybe days. A couple of million George fucking pinhead Zimmermans.
"Socialism or Barbarism" (rings truer and truer!) is a choice that excludes liberalism only because liberalism is too morally and aesthetically insubstantial to make the cut. Imagine the choice in the form of a movie, and liberalism would be the twitching little grass who betrays the hero for the price of a bottle of White Lighting.
(In real life it's not a bottle of cider, of course: it's more likely a nice old house in a gentrified area that still holds on to the charming character of the people it displaced, some of whom spend 5 hours a day on the bus to come back and work in the charming shops and eateries, or as nannies and cleaners....).
This is a very good piece (as you'd expect from a cultural critic as smart as Frank is), but it really needs to be read alongside Adolph L. Reed's excoriating article in Harper's from 2014, "Nothing Left: The Slow Surrender of American Liberals":sarahsmith232 , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>
The left has no particular place it wants to go. And, to rehash an old quip, if you have no destination, any direction can seem as good as any other. The left careens from this oppressed group or crisis moment to that one, from one magical or morally pristine constituency or source of political agency (youth/students; undocumented immigrants; the Iraqi labor movement; the Zapatistas; the urban "precariat"; green whatever; the black/Latino/LGBT "community"; the grassroots, the netroots, and the blogosphere; this season's worthless Democrat; Occupy; a "Trotskyist" software engineer elected to the Seattle City Council) to another. It lacks focus and stability; its métier is bearing witness, demonstrating solidarity, and the event or the gesture. Its reflex is to "send messages" to those in power, to make statements, and to stand with or for the oppressed.
We are in a very bad place right now, in terms of ideas and arguments. The opposition, in pretty much every western hemisphere country, has been colonised by the same people: professional politicians, upper-middle-class in social background, educated at the same small group of elite universities, reflexively committed to meritocratic ideology. They're very good at expressing sympathy for the marginalised, at saying the right words, at, as Reed says, "sending messages" and engaging in representational politics. But all those gestures do nothing for the constituencies they supposedly represent. They're ultimately selfish -- focussed on their own career advancement and the narrow class interests of the meritocratic-professional elite itself. The opposition, as Frank himself once said, "has ceased to oppose" in any economically meaningful sense. (Although they're very good at symbolic forms of opposition on cultural and historical issues.)And now their constituencies have noticed and have withdrawn their votes.
according to exit polls every section of white America, old, young, affluent, low-income, educated/not voted Trump, all bar 'young college educated white females', older college educated white females also voted Trump.alanredangel , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>
Same here with Brexit, voting patterns show the all white groups voted out, nothing to do with education levels, income or age.
The pundits write about 'the crisis of liberalism',, hhmmm, I think it should more be 'the rejection of illiberal openess'. When we say 'immigration needs to be reduced' the 'elites' reach for the favourite fall back 'you're a white that's racist/fascist/backward/uneducated' etc etc etc response. Well, turns out, the white part is right, the rest is just class based ignorance. Clinton was the absolute embodiment of this type of ignorance and arrogance. That basket of deplorables thing was disgusting, I felt personally insulted by it myself (i'm in the UK). Absolute standard 'elite' arrogance and hatred of those that don't agree with you. She's just paid for that hate by alienating absolutely EVERY SINGLE section of white America.
Trump's politics is a rejection of a globalism that has damaged the interests of so many, we're all far far too open to the forces of the world coming in at us from all directions, Catholics in Eastern Europe are not allowed their Christian values, are smeared as backward and ordered by foreign 'elites' in Brussels to drop all that they hold dear or face fines. We've all watched as the Remoaners showed to the world just exactly how 'tolerant' and 'accepting' they are of those they don't agree with, erupting into a torrent of class based ignorance and venomous hatred.
Well, they've all been at all this for far too long, and we're all pushing back against it. Spew race based hate at those that don't agree with you, BBC journalists shouting 'Nazi, fascist, racist' at any slight tightening up of immigration, Hilary Clinton labelling most white working-class a basket of fascist deployarables and hey presto, you lose to a repulsive cartoon like Trump.
They need to start thinking on about just exactly who it is in reality that's the race haters. Most are on the Left.Mr Baker , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine.
Good writing.
This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our community standards . Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs .hflashman , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>Given that Republicans have been opposed to intervention by Big Government at least since the Great Depression if Trump gets the go ahead for some of his ideas it will be a case of 4 legs good 2 legs better.Omoikani , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>gipsymermaid , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station.
Quite so. And now the elitist corporate media which got everything wrong, including their highly confident predictions about the result, will now tell you in a highly confident manner all the things that are going to happen as a result of the thing they said wouldn't happen. First to dash off a thousand words of hyperventilating predictions? Jonathan Freedland , so top marks to him for speed, if nothing else.
Interesting article, and in a way I sensed it coming unfortunately, at least in the meaning that I have always felt that certain liberal and "progressive" thoughts are just too alien from basic human nature, and are being forced to enter the mainstream a bit too fast, and that this is a huge risk in the sense that when people decide they are not ready for these and it's time to reject them properly, then all the valuable, truly liberating and forward-thinking ideas will be drained along with them and that means dark times ahead indeed.bobkolker , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>I am from Eastern-Europe, and, while I don't have a lot of personal memories of the communist times myself, most of the liberal bits of my cultural heritage comes from the counter-culture, a lot of the things we value today in my country were, albeit not necessarily all illegal as such, certainly more of the taboo sort, than they would have been in the West. Now it looks like that with all this Brexit and America, the West will have to learn to use the liberal thinking to serve as meaningful criticism of the system that will be built in the future by these new people. It's the Westerner's turn now, to learn to read between the lines and produce culture with purpose other than entertainment (if there is any positive side to this, then it should be the rise of new, creative movies and the end of the high-budget superhero era, and the birth of music with lyrics worth listening to lol, that's what I keep telling myself as my silver lining for now at least.)
It's obviously difficult to compare, nothing, in the entire world at the time was this commercialised and business and technology and life and everything was obviously very different. And, crucially, whilst the commies declared themselves to be ruling in the name of the common working people, they had their own breed of intellectuals, at least in my country, there was an approved bunch of scientists, artists etc, who could stretch it and provide some sense. So, worryingly enough, from this point of view I wouldn't say they were comparable to the type of anti-intellectualist mob rule seemingly putting these people into power, and that is my real fear, that these new rulers will not even have their own bunch of approved scientists who might not approve the views of atheists or feminists or whatever, but would at least be ready to provide these new governments with sound advice on the environment, education, health, etc.
I'm not sure how avoidable this could have been in reality, but it should have been, because we have no time for such ideological bullsh*t games (excuse my words), the damage we are doing to our own, living planet is becoming irreparable, and we really, absolutely, from all backgrounds and cultures must work together to basically stay alive.
The arrogance and snotty mindedness of the progressive liberal establishment has be dealt a righteous slap in the face which they have been asking for, for decades. The Revolt of the Deplorables. This was the winter of our discontent. Now it is our turn.Jamozki , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>Time will tell whether this upset is the beginning of a much better era in the U.S.
I voted for Trump not because I like him (personally I find him repulsive) but because he was a wrecking ball and a sledge hammer to be used against the liberal progressives that have been running the U.S. into the ground for decades.
This the Moment of the Ticked Off Deplorables.
This is also a surprise. This is the most exciting time since Truman defeated Dewey.
Except it was the Republicans (not the "white collar liberals") who deregulated the Wall Street banks. It was the Republicans who gave tax breaks to the wealthy 1% and it was the Republicans who got rid of welfare. The biggest con of all? That the majority of uneducated Americans who just voted Republican, think that the GOP represent thier interests and it's all the fault of the "liberals". We are without doubt witnessing the beginning of the end of the American empire...Down2dirt Jamozki , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>Clinton kept all Bush Senior's 'experts' , loonies like Greenspan. Obama's candidate?grauniadreader101 Jamozki , 9 Nov 2016 12:2>Wake up! They are two cheeks of the same arse.
grauniadreader101 Jamozki , 9 Nov 2016 12:2>We are without doubt witnessing the beginning of the end of the American empire...
And about time, too! That said, you are right about the GOP being the party of deregulation, tax-breaks for the rich etc. but since in the 35 years since Reagan, when bank deregulation began in earnest (I know, Nixon repealed the Gold Standard), we have had 16 years of Democratic rule, and NOTHING has been done to reverse it; in fact, quite the opposite. Most of the damage was done between Clinton (who repealed Glass-Steigel) and his chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan.
Thomas Fr
ProperEnglishman 4d agoWe are without doubt witnessing the beginning of the end of the American empire...
And about time, too! That said, you are right about the GOP being the party of deregulation, tax-breaks for the rich etc. but since in the 35 years since Reagan, when bank deregulation began in earnest (I know, Nixon repealed the Gold Standard), we have had 16 years of Democratic rule, and NOTHING has been done to reverse it; in fact, quite the opposite. Most of the damage was done between Clinton (who repealed Glass-Steigel) and his chairman of the Fed, Alan Greenspan.
Thomas Frank is right on the money. People voted for Trump precisely because both parties represent business as usual and people are sick of it. Same with Brexit.
ank is right on the money. People voted for Trump precisely because both parties represent business as usual and people are sick of it. Same with Brexit.
The silent majority,the ones who go to work pay their taxes and quietly get on with life have spoken. Don't underestimate us. We're intelligent, humble and caring. We're entitled to a view. We've had enough, we don't have to bully scream and shout to get our way, we go down to the polling station and we put a cross in the box we feel passionately about and we go home back to our quiet lives-job done.Well done the people of America,you have had the equivalent to our Brexit and now let's get the world back to how it should be. One of the most satisfying parts is listening to the Lefties,Luvvies and BBC crying their eyes out. The times they are a changing.
mouchefisher , 9 Nov 2016 12:1>
It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability. Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system. Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough!HenryGeorgeFan , 9 Nov 2016 12:2>Amen to that. Thank you, Thomas Frank, for articles such as this one. A lone voice of progressive reason at the Guardian (neo)liberal circus.
We need to overhaul the DNC, as well as the Guardian and NYT editorial boards.
She was the Democratic candidate because it was her turn and because a Clinton victory would have moved every Democrat in Washington up a notch.
Spot on. And this is exactly the misery that infects both wings of the Labour Party.
People in politics jostling for power and status, like it's a hobby for them, a kind of shoot-em up where the consequences of policy affect only other people.
Cameron and Johnson and all the slime of the Tory party suffer from the same disease.
Why do you want to be prime minister, you spam faced Tefal foreheaded dilettante?
"Well, I think I'd be rather good at it."
Well, you weren't. You were awful at it, because you had no basic guiding principles, just like all the other dilettantes from Eton and all the other posh boy Petri dishes where hubris is cultivated.
Buggin's turn.
Well, bug off.
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ilsm -> John San Vant... November 09, 2016 at 01:51 PMIt was establishment versus the rest...... It did not help the establishment that their candidate was crooked. 5 states turned red overnight!mhd28 -> ilsm... November 10, 2016 at 09:34 AM
It's hard to state that MI and WI turned Republican. Trump reviled R's as much as D's. They went for Trump, which is separate from Republicans.
JF -> JF... November 08, 2016 at 10:54 PM
Trump took what should have been democrats' issues. Clinton should simply have tried to take all of Sanders positions, working with Sanders, and then position Trump as the faker who was taking the dems positions. Alas, she did not.
Many saw this possibility. Brexit.
sglover -> JF... November 08, 2016 at 11:11 PM
Clinton made her usual lame, transparent attempts to co-opt Sanders' positions, but being Clinton, few people **believe** her.
Sanders backers always said that Clinton was almost uniquely capable of losing to a fraud like Trump, and here, apparently -- tragically -- we are.
And believing Dems will learn not one goddam thing. Expect the special pleading and blame-shifting to amp up to jet engine levels. Already Saint Krugman has smeared the Greens for Clinton's loss in Florida, which seems to mathematically impossible by an order of magnitude.
Clinton lost **Pennsylvania**, for Christ's sake! She seems to have lost Philly!! How does an even semi-competent candidate pull that off?!?!?
Adamski -> mulp... November 09, 2016 at 02:24 AM
...And Clintonians spent decades claiming neoliberalism was necessary to get moderate voters who went for Reagan, and that liberalism is too unpopular to win an election. They stuck to that script in post-Great Recession America, which is not post-Reagan America.
And they stuck with a candidate who has zero ability to get independent voters. Her leftward moves in response to Sanders on college tuition and more funding for health clinics (which Sanders said would achieve free primary care in the US) would have got out the vote, but she preferred to talk in infuriating platitudes and smear Trump as a Russian puppet to get the patriotic vote.
srbarbour -> Adamski... November 09, 2016 at 04:45 AM
"... but she preferred to talk in infuriating platitudes and smear Trump as a Russian puppet to get the patriotic vote."
This, I think, is a valid criticism. Hillary and the older Dems were truly out of touch on this issue and failed to understand how poorly it played with the electorate (which is sad, because there are some real serious issues with Russia right now). Likewise, they failed to grasp how desperate Millennials / Rural whites have gotten and thus how important fixing the economy was for them.
ilsm -> Mathew... November 09, 2016 at 04:04 PM
Clinton morals....
Fix that on "we came, we saw, he died......" with a post up his you know where! Or the no fly zone thing to give another country to the foundation donors' terrorists. You all missed the point!
All the people don't see what you want us to! You could fool enough of the people when you needed to!
sglover -> Billy Joe... November 09, 2016 at 12:11 AM
The Russia nonsense was always overblown, typical Dem tactical ineptitude. I wouldn't be surprised if it backfired to Trump's advantage.
Dems never stopped to consider that
- Any mention of foreign data leakage had to remind people of Clinton's FOIA-avoiding server escapades, and
- You can find lots of Dem "consultants" and "strategists" who themselves have lucrative histories with sleazy overseas characters (Podesta, Biden's son, etc.).
srbarbour -> sglover... November 09, 2016 at 05:22 AM
"The Russia nonsense was always overblown, typical Dem tactical ineptitude. I wouldn't be surprised if it backfired to Trump's advantage."
From a campaign prospective, right conclusion. Wrong reason. Pushing the Russia connection damaged Hillary because it played up her "War Hawk" and "Military Industrial complex" ties for the public, which in turn strengthened the corporocrat accusation.
Worse, to the informed it smelled like W's push for war, and thus reminded everyone of Hillary's vote on Iraq. And those things hurt.
ilsm -> srbarbour... November 09, 2016 at 01:57 PM
Clinton is with Bill unmitigated war mongering neoliberalNeocon/ The Clinton Iraq vote was purely animus! Stepping away is prevarication. What went into Qaddafi was pure evil sent by Obama and his SecState.
ilsm -> Billy Joe... November 09, 2016 at 01:54 PM
Clinton was more into Sunni/GCC money and influence peddling. The Russian/Putin thing was fantasy! The main stream media [Stalinist] propaganda did not sell in the 5 key states that went red from blue.
ilsm -> RC AKA Darryl, Ron... November 09, 2016 at 02:30 PM
No, the point is the dems are crooked, Clinton was selected by the DNC (calling it crooked is repeating myself). I am convinced the US dodged a very severe mistake by electing Trump!
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Nov 12, 2016 | economistsview.typepad.com
George H. Blackford : November 09, 2016 at 12:05 AM , 2016 at 12:05 AMI said what I had to say back in 2009, http://www.rweconomics.com/blame.htm , and tried to explain it again during the primaries: http://www.rweconomics.com/Sanders1.htm . Now we will just have to wait and see, but I'm not hopeful.sglover -> George H. Blackford ... , November 09, 2016 at 12:52 AMGood essays. Sadly prescient.mulp -> sglover... , November 09, 2016 at 01:56 AMI thought Obama blew it in his first hundred days, when he refused to take on Wall Street, and instead played idiotic bipartisanship games with totally (and obviously) intransigent Republicans. But more recently I figured that at least he got the Iran deal going, and that looked like a significant gain for sanity. Now, if I understand Trump's ramblings on every other Tuesday, the deal is vulnerable.
You mean declare martial law and send the Marines into capture Wall Street, and ship them to Gitmo? Or didn't you notice the Republicans legalizing financial fraud over the past 40 years?George H. Blackford -> mulp... , November 09, 2016 at 01:20 PMIf you like I can detail the dozen major steps beginning circa 1970 like the camel nose unto the tent. Step one: retail money market funds as an alternative to bank savings accounts. They were a big fraud: "safer than FDIC bank savings accounts".
Re: "If you like I can detail the dozen major steps beginning circa 1970 like the camel nose unto the tent." I'll do it for you:JF -> sglover... , November 09, 2016 at 04:14 AMhttp://www.rweconomics.com/htm/Ch_1.htm
http://www.rweconomics.com/htm/Ch_7.htm
http://www.rweconomics.com/Deficit.htmsrbarbour -> JF... , November 09, 2016 at 05:31 AMYes, totally agree with the point that Obama did not understand the strategic moment and instead aligned himself in a way that legitimized the opposition's points.
Simpson Bowles was benighted. TPP was senseless. How could a party that stood for working people give away social security and then try to give away jobs some more. Strategists should have been screaming that this was positioning the party in a way that was opposite to what the party had stood for in opposition to the republican elite.
Of course, Clinton was the wrong candidate as she is a archetype, tied to Trade deals, Glass Steagel and even the Iraq war.
I would like to see the democratic party stand fir work in the US.
Alas.
"Simpson Bowles was benighted. TPP was senseless. How could a party that stood for working people give away social security and then try to give away jobs some more...."srbarbour -> sglover... , -1Just wanted to say, good tactical analysis there.
"I thought Obama blew it in his first hundred days, when he refused to take on Wall Street, and instead played idiotic bipartisanship games with totally (and obviously) intransigent Republicans."Hard to say, 2009 had a very different atmosphere and there was a very real desire in the electorate to return to bipartisanship. Plus, bipartisanship was kind of a major Obama campaign promise.
That said, the only gain Dems got from that was a general fuzzy, awareness the Republican partisanship is one-sided. A boon that is now tactically useless because the Republicans will control every branch of the government. So in hindsight, pure fail. However, forgiveable in context.
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Nov 12, 2016 | www.zerohedge.com
Oliver Klozoff -> Oliver Klozoff Nov 12, 2016 9:26 AM ,I forgot to add a development, Chris Matthews stuns the liberal crowd with a takedown of hrc's campaign.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXxGPDBRUzs
Anybody but the brain dead could see HRC ran a lazy campaign focused on a non-issue. It's clear she expected certain quarters of the population's loyalty in voting but offered them nothing. One hopes these libs begin to wake up.
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www.cnn.com
As Democrats reel in the wake of Donald Trump's stunning victory, a new storm is brewing inside the party as competing factions begin to grapple for its leadership.
Howard Dean, who ran the Democratic National Committee from 2005 to 2009, announced on Thursday he would again seek its top role. Soon after he announced, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and his top allies began pushing Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison for the role.
But other politicos expressed interest in the job Friday. Former presidential candidate Martin O'Malley announced that he is throwing his hat in the ring.
"Since the election, I have been approached by many Democrats who believe our party needs new leadership," said the former Maryland Governor. "I'm taking a hard look at DNC Chair because I know how badly we need to reform our nominating process, articulate a bold progressive vision, recommit ourselves to higher wages and a stronger middle class, and return to our roots as a nationwide, grassroots party."
New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman and DNC Vice Chair Ray Buckley is exploring a run, according to the Boston Globe.
... ... ...
Sanders -- a registered independent who caucuses with Democrats and fought a lengthy primary battle for the party's nomination this year -- and top allies are touting Ellison for the job. The Muslim-American congressman currently co-chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
... ... ...
On Thursday night, People for Bernie, a tech-savvy progressive group with ties to Sanders, told CNN it was backing Ellison as a first step in displacing Clinton loyalists with "a leadership untainted by cozy relationships to Wall St. moneymen, corporate behemoths, dictators, or monarchs."
In a jab at Dean, People for Bernie co-founder Charles Lenchner added, "Any 50-state strategy must begin with a 50-state accountability project; we reject any effort to unite the party behind the agents of a failed leadership."
The current head of the DNC is Donna Brazile, a longtime Democratic operative and former CNN contributor, who is leading in an interim capacity after Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned on the eve of the convention. Hacked emails appeared to show Wasserman Schultz and other since-departed DNC officials discussing ways to undermine Sanders' effort to oust Clinton in the primary.
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www.cnn.com
The campaign communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, said in a statement Friday that "no one anticipated" losing. She said many factors were at work, but she listed Comey as chief among them.
"We didn't blame everyone but ourselves," Palmieri said. "We acknowledged a lot of challenges we faced, plenty of mistakes made along the way, some challenges we weren't able to overcome."
She added: "What changed in the last week that made his turn out go up and our's go down? The only thing apparent was Comey. It was one thing too many. Could not overcome it."
Democrats close to Bill Clinton said Thursday that one mistake Clinton's top aides made was not listening to the former president more when he urged the campaign to spend more time focusing on disaffected white, working class voters.
Many in Clinton's campaign viewed these voters as Trump's base, people so committed to the Republican nominee that no amount of visits or messaging could sway them. Clinton made no visits to Wisconsin as the Democratic nominee, and only pushed a late charge in Michigan once internal polling showed the race tightening.
Bill Clinton, advisers said, pushed the campaign early on to focus on these voters, many of whom helped elected him twice to the White House. The former president, a Clinton aide said, would regularly call Robby Mook to talk about strategy and offer advice.
But aides said the Clinton campaign's top strategists largely ignored the former president, instead focusing on consolidating the base of voters that helped elect President Barack Obama to the White House. In the closing days of the campaign, Clinton targeted young people, Hispanics and African-Americans with laser like focus, casting Trump as a racist who only sought the presidency to benefit himself.
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www.cnn.com
The extraordinary repudiation -- partly based on Trump's rejection of basic US foreign policy tenets, including support for close allies -- helped spark the hashtag #NeverTrump. Now, a source familiar with transition planning says that hard wall of resistance is crumbling fast.
There are "boxes" of applications, the source said. "There are many more than people realize."
Some of those applications are coming from the #NeverTrump crowd, the source said, and include former national security officials who signed one or more of the letters opposing Trump. "Mea culpas" are being considered -- and in some cases being granted, the source said -- for people who did not go a step further in attacking Trump personally.
... ... ...
Fifty GOP national security experts signed an August letter saying Trump "would put at risk our country's national security and well-being" because he "lacks the character, values and experience" to occupy the Oval Office, making him "the most reckless president in American history."
Another bipartisan letter cited concern about potential foreign conflicts of interest Trump might encounter as president, and called on him to disclose them by releasing his tax returns. Trump has refused to do so, saying he is under audit and will make the returns public only once that is done.
It remains to be seen what kind of team Trump will pull together, how many "NeverTrumpers" will apply for positions and to what degree the President-elect will be willing to accept them.
There's a fight underway within the Trump transition team about whether to consider "never Trumpers" for jobs, one official tells CNN. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is leading the transition team, has been working to persuade Trump and other top officials to consider Republicans who openly opposed his campaign. That has caused some friction with those who see no place for people who didn't support their candidate.
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Nov 11, 2016 | www.theguardian.com
What has happened in America should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency. It is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.
At the core of that structure are the political leaders of both parties, their political operatives, and fundraisers; the major media, centered in New York and Washington DC; the country's biggest corporations, their top executives, and Washington lobbyists and trade associations; the biggest Wall Street banks, their top officers, traders, hedge-fund and private-equity managers, and their lackeys in Washington; and the wealthy individuals who invest directly in politics.
At the start of the 2016 election cycle, this power structure proclaimed Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush shoo-ins for the nominations of the Democratic and Republican parties. After all, both of these individuals had deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisers and all the political name recognition any candidate could possibly want.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House. The presidency was won by Donald Trump, who made his fortune marketing office towers and casinos, and, more recently, starring in a popular reality-television program, and who has never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican party. Hillary Clinton narrowly won the popular vote, but not enough of the states and their electors secure a victory.
Hillary Clinton's defeat is all the more remarkable in that her campaign vastly outspent the Trump campaign on television and radio advertisements, and get-out-the-vote efforts. Moreover, her campaign had the support in the general election not of only the kingpins of the Democratic party but also many leading Republicans, including most of the politically active denizens of Wall Street and the top executives of America's largest corporations, and even former Republican president George HW Bush. Her campaign team was run by seasoned professionals who knew the ropes. She had the visible and forceful backing of Barack Obama, whose popularity has soared in recent months, and his popular wife. And, of course, she had her husband.
Trump, by contrast, was shunned by the power structure. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, actively worked against Trump's nomination. Many senior Republicans refused to endorse him, or even give him their support. The Republican National Committee did not raise money for Trump to the extent it had for other Republican candidates for president.
What happened?
There had been hints of the political earthquake to come. Trump had won the Republican primaries, after all. More tellingly, Clinton had been challenged in the Democratic primaries by the unlikeliest of candidates – a 74-year-old Jewish senator from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and who was not even a Democrat. Bernie Sanders went on to win 22 states and 47% of the vote in those primaries. Sanders' major theme was that the country's political and economic system was rigged in favor of big corporations, Wall Street and the very wealthy.
... ... ...
The power structure of America wrote off Sanders as an aberration, and, until recently, didn't take Trump seriously. A respected political insider recently told me most Americans were largely content with the status quo. "The economy is in good shape," he said. "Most Americans are better off than they've been in years."
Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don't reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.
Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers without college degrees – the old working class – have fallen furthest. Most economic gains, meanwhile, have gone to top. These gains have translated into political power to elicit bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes, favorable trade deals and increasing market power without interference by anti-monopoly enforcement – all of which have further reduced wages and pulled up profits.
Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and they blame the establishment for it.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in "swing" suburbs.
Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of those years had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline in working-class wages and economic security. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class – failing to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violate them, or help workers form unions with simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership sank from 22% of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12% today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy's gains.
Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising result of this combination – more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration – has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump's authoritarian demagoguery, and his presidency.
Now Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America against foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Trump's isolationism will stymie economic growth. But most Americans couldn't care less about growth because for years they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.
The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn't wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump.
gloriousrevolution , 11 Nov 2016 15:5
I'm in agreement with RR, as far as he goes. He could have gone further, but it's probably not the time or place for that, anyway, that road is depressing.zootsuitbeatnick , 11 Nov 2016 15:5Trump's an opportunist, certainly, but a very, very, successful one indeed. He has, after all, made an awful lot of money that way, so he's not that lacking in intelligence and ruthlessness. If only Sanders had been more ruthless and willing to stick the knife into the Democratic Party when he had the chance.
Trump, essentially ran as an independent. First he needed to defeat the Republican Party's establishment, which he did, take over the party and only then was he ready to challenge the Democrats and beat them down. He succeeded in his strategy, beating both of them, which is an astonishing feat, historic in character.
It actually gets worse for liberals. Trump also took on the liberal media and despite their best efforts to destroy him, brazenly supporting Clinton and ridiculing Trump and his supporters... Trump didn't just survive the onslaught, but crushed the media as well. Vast swathes of the population hate and despise the media as much as they loathe the political elite. People simply don't believe the media anymore, so most of their attacks on Trump were useless and ineffective when they came.
And it really isn't Trump that's important here. It's the character of the wave he surfed on and lifted him into the White House. But the media ignored the wave and have done for years and years. Now, the fascist chickens have really come home to roost and much of the responsibility lies with the incredible ignorance, arrogance and mind-numbing stupidity that characterizes so much of the media.
"Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more."judyblue , 11 Nov 2016 14:2
And they haven't since Bill Clinton had his way with the party in the 90s.
As much as the right enjoys calling the Clintons liberals, they're not.
They're neo-liberals, which is a whole different philosophy.
The Dems abandoned those who supported them for generations and we are all living in the ever-worsening result of that betrayal.So Robert Reich spent the past year enthusiastically encouraging us to vote for a candidate who embodied every last bit of the formula that he now tells us was a sure loser. Should he perhaps have warned his long-time good friend Hillary that she was on the wrong road? That being the servant of Wall Street and promising the status quo with incremental progress was a recipe for failure?Dave Hobbs judyblue , 11 Nov 2016 15:4Except Reich was a Sanders supporter...twitty , 11 Nov 2016 14:1As you say, sir:newsfrommars twitty , 11 Nov 2016 15:0
"The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn't wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump."
This includes Obama's role as enabler.
Ironic, that Obama was a charismatic campaigner who failed entirely to become a charismatic president. And he lost to a candidate who had another sort of charisma: That of a lying, sneering, insulting, self-important clown.
Shows how bad things have become for a once hard-working & productive middle class now set adrift.The same power structure that has for decades ignored the plight of millions in favour of it's own elitist wealth building, little wonder this election result. The neo liberals by their arrogance and lack of empathy have brought us to this setting us back decades. Clinton was definately does not hold any sympathy for the downtrodden, she cannot, she's in another class, the billionaire type. That is why we must never trust them or ever look again to people with this background to help us. They are responsible for the descent towards fascism and the people are responsible for their utter gullability in believing them in the first place.morphy smith twitty , 11 Nov 2016 15:3Obama is the worst president and most divisive. he is the master race baiter as well.ga gamba , 11 Nov 2016 13:0Nov 11, 2016 | Pinterest
How the 2016 US election night unfolded
The power structure of America wrote off Sanders as an aberration, and, until recently, didn't take Trump seriously. A respected political insider recently told me most Americans were largely content with the status quo. "The economy is in good shape," he said. "Most Americans are better off than they've been in years."
Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don't reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.
Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers without college degrees – the old working class – have fallen furthest. Most economic gains, meanwhile, have gone to top. These gains have translated into political power to elicit bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes, favorable trade deals and increasing market power without interference by anti-monopoly enforcement – all of which have further reduced wages and pulled up profits.
Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and they blame the establishment for it.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in "swing" suburbs.
Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of those years had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline in working-class wages and economic security. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class – failing to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violate them, or help workers form unions with simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership sank from 22% of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12% today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy's gains.
Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising result of this combination – more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration – has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump's authoritarian demagoguery, and his presidency.
Now Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America against foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Trump's isolationism will stymie economic growth. But most Americans couldn't care less about growth because for years they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.
The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn't wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump.
I give Mr Reich his due. He recognised the the issue and foresaw this outcome when he wrote about it on 25 Jan 2016 .Paul Eichhorn , 11 Nov 2016 12:4I've known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for her. In my view, she's the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now have.
But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have, because he's leading a political movement for change.
The upcoming election isn't about detailed policy proposals. It's about power – whether those who have it will keep it, or whether average Americans will get some as well. [...]
Which explains a paradox I found a few months ago when I was on book tour in the nation's heartland: I kept bumping into people who told me they were trying to make up their minds in the upcoming election between Sanders and Trump.
At first I was dumbfounded. The two are at opposite ends of the political divide. But as I talked with these people, I kept hearing the same refrains. They wanted to end "crony capitalism." They detested "corporate welfare," such as the Wall Street bailout.
They wanted to prevent the big banks from extorting us ever again. Close tax loopholes for hedge-fund partners. Stop the drug companies and health insurers from ripping off American consumers. End trade treaties that sell out American workers. Get big money out of politics. [...]
You don't care about the details of proposed policies and programs.
You just want a system that works for you.
If you click his name at the byline you'll see how many articles published in 2016. Now think about the number of pieces published that pushed the pro-Clinton argument of more of the same.
"Third-Way" Democrats made an art form of triangulating a position between the old-line liberal Democrats the positions made by the mainstream corporate Republican party. By tacking as far right as possible, these corporate Democrats could scrape off enough of the business friendly, socially progressive Independents and Republicans to stymie any sort of Republican Presidential bid. Corporate America gave to both parties, but loves first and foremost to be on the side of the winner, where its influence can manifest itself in business friendly legislation, politically friendly appointments, no prosecutions for criminal behavior. no enforcement of labor or business legislation and no break-ups of monopolies using the still existent anti-trust legislation.Iron Mike , 11 Nov 2016 11:1
One of the things that made Republicans furious during Bill Clinton's term was that he was skilled in the extreme at taking issues the Republicans were pushing and getting out in front of them and making the issue his own, making the result at least somewhat palpable to the old liberals of the world.
The Democrats became the other war party, the other big business party, the other big banking party, the other big agriculture party, the other big oil party, the other big communications party, the other international exploitation party, the other anti-union party the other big medical party, the other big pharmaceutical party, the other international trade deal party.
Bill Clinton sat down with Alan Greenspan and agreed to be the other austerity party. He supported low tax rates on the billionaires and corporations and low tariffs. That led to lower services for the public and small businesses and the tax burden being borne by the long suffering middle class and working poor. The non-working poor suffered as well with no welfare, more stringent unemployment benefits, and a stagnant job market for meaningful jobs. At the same time, law enforcement was focusing on them, putting them in prison for extreme amounts of time for often trivial matters.
But Bill had an overall good economy because of the Computer Generation, so the economy grew and he was able to deliver to George W. Bush a budget surplus, which, if maintained, would have entirely paid off the national debt by now.
Unfortunately all those economic gains were being funneled to the top. Overall wages of working people actually declined since Ronald Reagan came in to begin the austerity measures while the wealth of the top 1% quadrupled. Working people were losing good paying jobs and having to have both wage earners in a family work lesser jobs to make up for hemorrhaging income. These lesser jobs not only had less wages, they had less benefits. Against an out of control health care industry, banking industry, communications industry and investment industry they were being sucked dry well before retirement. No amount of savings could stand up to catastrophic illness. People's 401K plans were repeatedly slaughtered while the big guys who precipitated the mess ended up owning more and more of the means of generating wealth in our country. Remember the absolutely sinful Republican law that made student debt unforgivable at the same time that school costs were skyrocketing? It was so unpopular, Republicans needed help from Joe Biden and other corporate Democrats to get it passed.
Never mind the corporate media and Republican lies about Barack Obama being a "Liberal", he was, in fact, another version of corporate Democrat. Since he was black, the racist Republicans could do the unprecedented in America politics: they decided to block everything. For no good reason. Other than he was black and no one would hold them accountable. He went along with the austerity plan because he had no other option. Able enough manager, he was able to drastically reduce the national deficit virtually on his own. But he kept up the wars. Hell, he and Hillary Clinton started wars for oil and natural gas. Just like the Republicans. Along with the very expensive war and secret intelligence budget and police state budget. He has restarted the nuclear weapons program, never mind that we already have enough nukes to destroy the world 100 times over. He also longed for hanging his hat on another record-breaking Trans Pacific Partnership international trade deal encompassing 40% of the world's Gross Domestic Product. Like Bill Clinton/George HW Bush's NAFTA on steroids. Jobs would be flowing out to low wage countries and waves of filthy international profits would come flowing back in to: the top 1%, where presumably the fraud of trickle down economics would waged on the American worker once again.Yup the elites got hammered Tuesday. Even though they say they are for democracy, they aren't. The elites want open borders and the people at the bottom of the wage scale are having to compete against these low wage border jumpers.Rick LaBonte , 11 Nov 2016 09:3How can the elites say they are for open borders and for raising wages. It isn't possible. It is the law of supply and demand. Sure the government could pass minimum wage increases but that will drive businesses to automate as much as possible. That ain't going to help these people either!
Wikileaks proved that the Democrat party is the party of the ruling class elites, no question. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders? Give me a break, These two phonies are owned lock stock and barrel by Wall Street and the Big Banks. Warren's Consumer Protection racket is like Dodd-Frank - a Potemkin village of fake reforms designed to kill off any competition to the ruling class oligarchs.molemen , 11 Nov 2016 08:2A better analysis than the hysterical white/kkk/racist/woman hater etc pieces that have been flooding the pages lately.maryB_USA , 11 Nov 2016 08:0Its "dont piss on my back and tell me its raining" stuff, Obamacare has stung those in work, in some cases badly, and those out of work see no hope or change either.
No-one went to jail for screwing the world economy.
Even the government agencies who had oversight, and failed to see one single indicator of trouble saw no-one demoted, just a call for more power.And lastly importing more people to compete for low skilled jobs from overseas does keep downward pressure on wages, and make jobs harder to find for the native born. Pretending otherwise in some misguided sense of international "solidarity" is punishing your own people for outsiders advantage.
The roles of the two parties have been interchanged over the years, but they both ended up the same way -- serving the Davos community.Matt Dillon , 11 Nov 2016 08:0Some have suggested the formation of a third party as a possible remedy. I don't think that is the solution. As long as campaigns are financed through private contributions, the politicians elected would be beholden to the rich, regardless of the number of parties involved. The voice of the less privileged voters will not be heard. To have a truly representative body of elected officials, private (including corporate) campaign contributions should be eliminated from politics. Candidates should disseminate their message and platform in publicly funded campaigns. So I would say don't worry about the number of parties. Just get rid of Citizens United and limit spending for political campaigns to public funding.
The present Republican-controlled government will not do that. HRC had promised to get rid of Citizens United. The only remedy now is to organize and try to give the House in 2 years to whoever will do so.
If was the duffus you worked for Mr. Reich who repealed the Glass-Steagall Act ushering in the tech bubble, the housing bubble and now the 'everything' bubble. A financialization of our economy that has benefited only the top 10 to 15 percent of the population.valwayne , 11 Nov 2016 08:0I don't usually agree w Sex Reich but he mostly right here. The Democratic Party has been corrupted & a tool of Goldman Sachs, Wall Street, Big Banks, & Corrupt Democrat billionaires ...Maurith , 11 Nov 2016 06:3Wall Street does care if the kill growth & jobs as long as they keep interest rates at Zero & Print trillions to fuel the market & fill their pockets. Same w the banks.
The Democrats have Total comtempt for working Americans out here in what they call flyover land. You know... IW WI MI OH. So Reich is right there but more Gov, more socialism is not the answers. Economic growth & free Enterprise w sound monetary policy to crest jobs & raise incomes is what we need & what Trump will provide.There's definitely a failure of government to do its job: to ensure that the market economy works to improve the lives of all people (they instead ensure that they get a job at a Goldman Sachs or a Morgan Stanley once they leave government). Robert Reich points out in the article that the government never steps in to prevent anti-monopoly practices. To his point, one has only to look at the over-valued market capitalizations of the financial and pharmaceutical sectors to see that these guys are getting a free ride. Since not everyone can be a Paul Volcker, one may have to raise the pay grade of civil servants to attract the best talents.frankelee , 11 Nov 2016 05:5Whether he's a Democrat or a Republican, the white voter is a bit lost, unable to find his way in a world where the white man no longer dominates. This doesn't apply to the working or middle class.
This said, it's not because we want change that we're going to cast our vote for a monster like Trump. We know what happened in 1933 in Germany, in 1917 in Russia. Whether it's gas chambers or the Goulag, these psychopaths (Hitler, Stalin) can go very far. The worst ones are the toned-down versions: a Hitler Light. I sure won't vote for Marine Le Pen.
It's truly a worrying time for the intelligent citizen. Democrats fail the middle class, yet for all my life there's only been one party who would throw their own mother on hot coals and walk over her body to give a rich man a tax cut: the Republican Party. I hope it's true that Trump represents their defeat just as much as the Democrats. They've sold out their base for decades now, peddling condescending lies and culture war excuses for their greed and cronyism. Not a single Republican used to be an expert scientist until reducing pollution was going to cost their donors a few dollars, then all of sudden they all knew better than a PhD how the climate worked. Their last President started a war and gave no-bid government contracts to his friends, and even tried to privatize Social Security so business associates could skim off the top of that too, consequences be damned. When neither side is either willing or able to save you, what can you do?Joe Daigle , 11 Nov 2016 05:5Mr. Reich, you can't see the forest for the trees. Hillary promised that AFTER you lost your job to bad trade deals, she'd help you to retrain to become a 7-11 night clerk. In essence, she was offering to bury your job in a fine casket. Donald offered to fight for your job and shake up America's trade deals if he had to in order to level the playing field and keep our manufacturing here. And oh yea, bring some jobs back home too. He also said he would protect them from cheap labor pouring across the border legally and illegally. Illegal Latinos don't all work picking lettuce - some drive trucks, do construction, are plumbers, carpenters, electricians, shipyard workers, you know - jobs our own citizens want. It's not about whether you can strangle another company with union demands, it's about the lack of jobs period. So in essence, Hillary wanted open borders and all of our jobs going to Latinos. Donald wants the opposite.BizaaroLand , 11 Nov 2016 04:4Wonder what makes you Einsteins think the republicans are now suddenly for the working man? Republicans have always been on the side of big money interests, and nothing has changed. Trump is just there to placate the mid western rubes. 'Mericuns are so naive. (no tolerance for propaganda like the Euros or Russians seem to have.) Trump is just a head fake. Its business as usual. He's just gonna pick up where Obama and Shrub left off. Seen this trick before.ceclas , 11 Nov 2016 03:5The Guardian needs to publish an editorial apologizing for being part of this problem. During the Sanders-Clinton race, the Guardian was nothing but derisive towards Sanders, and elevated Clinton as the responsible and adult choice to stop Donald Trump. They even compared Sanders to Nader as a spoiler from 2000, not realizing that all the warning signs were there that Clinton would play the role of John Kerry in 2004.DoyleSaylor ceclas , 11 Nov 2016 04:3There were comments in the comment section with people saying "I still don't fully understand the difference between Clinton and Sanders, can someone please explain it to me?" That was the Guardian's job. For the record, here is the correct explanation.
For decades the Democratic Party has abandoned working people and embraced globalization at their expense. Clinton was the candidate of continuity with that policy, Sanders was the candidate of "Hey, that was actually a bad idea, our mistake, we'll start caring about your issues as well." It was obvious that Clinton would be vulnerable in a general election against anyone who ran a populist platform, which Trump was doing.
This train wreck was obvious from a mile away. The DNC and the media need to own this blunder.
You are correct. I would add that electing trump has ended the dlc Democratic party. Of course my conjecture remains to be proved by events going forward. Still this rightwing shift has a real chance now to remain in power like the collapsed dlc Clinton Obama clique for a considerable period ahead. And besides that a restive U.S. working class is in motion with little obvious direction to the left right now. I would expect though a left opposition is coming rather soon.PATROKLUS00 , 11 Nov 2016 03:1The US is a country with a lot of very angry and unhappy people. The nation is in decline and the people are fearful; they know something is terribly wrong but they do not have the political acumen to deal with the situation. The two political parties, co-opted if not largely owned by the plutocracy-, offer no respite from the oppression of which, in fact, they are the instruments being vassals of their plutocratic masters.ViewFromTheUSA , 11 Nov 2016 03:0Unfortunately, the plutocracy and their subservient mass media have convinced about half of the population to vote, to their own destruction, for continual transfer of wealth and power to the corporations and plutocrats-. The Trumpers, arguably less educated, politically ignorant and naive, easily manipulated, and riddled with fear fueled with bigotry, are the leading edge of the discontent and fright. However, their blindness to reality is a severe obstacle to any possibility of getting that nation back on the track. The plutocrats-, like all parasites, will drain the nation of its lifeblood and then move on to another country to exploit.
As long as the Trumpeters and those of their ilk can be so easily duped and manipulated, it is unlikely that there will be any common ground. In fact, common ground is not what is needed. Rather, what is needed is an aggressively progressive agenda to restore democracy, economic recovery and re-establishment of a rapidly disappearing middle class.
Politicians like Clinton and Obama give paid speeches behind closed doors on Wall St, whom they bailed out at the expense of the people. They throw $10k-a-plate fundraisers with celebrities, and cozy up to the profit-over-people industries like big pharmaceutical and big oil. They are for hedge fund managers, payday lenders, defense contractors, and credit card companies. Then they have the gall to send out "tweets" saying we must overturn Citizens United.Julie Mendelsohn ViewFromTheUSA , 11 Nov 2016 05:4I realize the Republicans are no better, in fact, they're even worse, but everyone knows who and what they are. They make no bones about it, they don't dress up in wolf's clothing and pretend they are for the working man.
Democrats do. Democrats are like the Republicans from 30 years ago. Over the last 3 decades, the left has moved to the right and the right has moved into an insane asylum. So now it's the Democrats who do the red-baiting (see their treatment of Sanders) and the RNC are accusing neoliberal centre-right politicians like Obama of being a socialist. Socialist? He's not even a liberal.
You are forgetting to add in the "for profit' colleges. How much did Debbie Dearest get from *that* lobby? How many millions did Bill get to sit on their boards? These political grifters got paid big money by the very entities which were foreclosing on homes, suffocating kids with student loan debt, and tanking the economy via Wall Street schemes. The Dems thought we weren't paying attention?mike1798 , 11 Nov 2016 02:0Trump is offering a solution, that's all. Can he implement it, probably not, but no one else is even talking about re negotiating NAFTA, penalizing China or anything else to bring back millions of good paying factory jobs.rauch47 , 11 Nov 2016 02:0
Our politicians are out of touch, and corrupted by the oceans of money thrown at them. The 58 million people who voted for Trump want anyone to talk to them about what has happened to their lives and opportunities and address their problems.
Hillary may in fact be the most competent politician, but that is the problem. She never came across as a leader who would lead us out of our problems. So we elected a lying misogynist who is, at least, not a politician!Reich debated Chris Hedges on democracynow before the election, Hedges pointed outBehindBlurredLines , 11 Nov 2016 01:4
to him that under Ronald Ray-Gun the levers of power were given over to all the
corp's of the world, there isn't a DNC or a RNC, it's a less than one percent secure hold
on all power, Trump is just another puppet --The last two paragraphs are absolutely dead on with what happened. You can't cater to minorities and expect the majority to stick with you forever as they suffer. The Democrats are so blind they didn't understand why Bernie surged or why Trump won but this writer has real clarity and speaks the truth absolutely on it. If you ignore the majority, which is mostly working class or rural citizens, you lose election after election with never ever holding total power for long. Trump truly needs to be a Teddy Roosevelt up there and set the barn on fire to chase all of the rats out and rebuild it.Imperialist , 11 Nov 2016 00:5That's what we need and at least there is the tiniest sliver of hope he will, whereas with Hillary we would have received more establishment politics which always include purposeful half-truths and omissions at the working class's expense. Seriously, Schumer and Pelosi need to be investigated with Hillary Clinton because the way they act up there is exactly what made America a stagnant decaying landscape.
I think it's time we get to the real issues the majority and minority citizens face together and stop beating to death your four issues that are inconsequential to the other 90 % of us in one way or another. That goes for both parties too. It makes me wonder if they ever talk to anyone but the people who have money. It would seem so and it needs to change now because them people live in a bubble and bubbles always burst. Drag the swamp Donald on both sides of the isle and you will be my hero forever. Fail and you will be my most hated president yet.
And on a final note, thank god the Guardian has pulled back from the left some now and is being a good news source again. Thank you for this article and a big thank you to this writer for telling it like it
The parties are realigning.Bill Gorrell Imperialist , 11 Nov 2016 03:4Once the Democratic Party was the party of the working man. The union member. Blue collar. Trying to get higher wages for the working man.
The Republican Party was the party of capital. Bankers. Corporate types. Millionaires.
The Democrats abandoned the working man for the underclass.
Now it seems to becoming that the Republicans are the party of people who work for a living at a private job, along with the business owners.
The Democrats represent those who either don't work, or those who work for the State: welfare recipients, students, public union members, most every staffer in DC. Hollywood types. Millionaires, especially dot com ones.
Despite calling it racist over and over, unfettered immigration holds wages down. Free trade with China and Mexico guts unions and makes the proposed $15/hr minimum wage a joke when factories have all moved to Mexico or China. It's a fine thing with Britain, Germany or Canada, but a big loser with low wage countries. Especially with China who puts barriers in place for OUR exports.
It also didn't help when Katy Perry, Madonna and J.Lo endorsed Hillary. It sent more people towards the Republicans looking for people who looked like them. Who got up in the morning to go to work.
They are both the party of capital. The unleashed Repubs while destroy the working class.SomethingU8 Imperialist , 11 Nov 2016 04:0If U.S. Democrats have any sense, they'll kick the DNC leadership losers out and let Bernie and Elizabeth Warren lead the Party. Then we'll have at least one party that represents the interests of Workers.djsunset , 11 Nov 2016 00:5Trump has two years to make the lives of his supporters substantially better. Looking at the people around him, that's not likely to happen. I can't wait to see him make the case that more tax cuts for Huuge corporations will somehow help Working People! If they try more of the same, then the market crash will happen on their watch.
Good luck in 2018 then. Dems re-take House & Senate, with Bernie & Elizabeth Warren leading the way...
Robert Reich, the author of this article, fronted an excellent documentary in 2013 called "Inequality for All". It's well worth a watch.shazza618 , 11 Nov 2016 00:2There's a ropey/poor quality copy on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-MmIV_JBRg , but it's definitely worth getting hold of a good copy.
OFFS Robert.. STFU... after Bernie bowed out you shilled for Hill all the way to the election singing her "imaginary" praises. Fecking hypocrite.sandyssanders , 11 Nov 2016 00:1We are living through the death of "growth", the death of capitalism. The 1% are using the 99% as human shields to buffer themselves from the collapse of their religion and their Gawd, horded wealth. Trump will sellout his Chumps worse than Obama... And the idea that the TwoParty will ever move to meet the social needs of humanity is a pipe dream. The only way we will get this is by Direct Democracy. The 99% votes policy. The government are employees who implement those policies... or they are fired.netizenk , 11 Nov 2016 00:0Nearly every single elected politician currently in office on both sides is bought and paid for and works in the best interest of large corporations, not in the best interest of we the people. A complete purge, a system flush is required if we are to take our country back.Will Morgan , 10 Nov 2016 23:2It seams like a monumental task, it looks like an impossible mission when you look at the sheer amount of money and power in play but it is actually simple and it's all on us, all we need to do is stop voting for Repocrats and start voting for people of integrity outside of these two establishment parties.
That is the only way to quickly affect real change and if everyone did that we'd have our country back in no time. So stop bashing the people who are voting third party and independent, stop telling them that their vote is wasted or a vote for the "other side", realize that there are no two sides really and join them in voting the Repocrats out of everything and voting in the people who will overturn Citizens United, outlaw lobbying and pass a new campaign finance law that will take the money complete out of politics and allow us to elect the congress and the president that will work for us, not the Wall Street or MIC.
Is Trump's election really a rejection of the "power structure"? How could that be since that power structure, whether Democrat or Republican, remains intact decade after decade? I don't think Trump's victory is a rejection of the power structure. The rejection of the power structure was embodied, if anywhere, by the Sanders campaign, but it was defied by the Clinton's and by actors like Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and by the fraud employed by those actors during the primaries. In a system of only two parties voting for one or the other can simply be a vote based in anger about an excluded middle, or a non-existent "left". These frustrating complaints tell you more about the result than does "the power structure" who could care less which party wins, so long as their interests are served.ram Posthumus , 10 Nov 2016 23:1Some sanity at last amidst the demented ragings of the identity politics crowd that STILL does not understand that it was them who put Trump in the White House. Not white male rage. Not the shy white female vote. Not any other race/gender/sexuaity category that you wish to dream up.raskolnikov88 , 10 Nov 2016 23:1No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.
And no.What put Trump in the White House was a deeply dysfunctional political system. The fact that the symbol of this deeply dysfunctional political system happened to be female is neither here nor there. Understand this. Understand this and learn.
Ditch the identity politics. Become a real progressive, not a fake progressive deriving fatally deluded ideas from exclusio
Robert Reich is also no friend of the working class so why bother listen to him point his fingerGary Reber , 10 Nov 2016 23:1Robert Reich actually gets this right. Well stated.Mikael Carpelan , 10 Nov 2016 22:2"Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and they blame the establishment for it."
Reich has some points, but is ignoring several key circumstances, such as the 72K$ median income among Trump supporters, but mainly hostile legislators blocking anything more than incremental changes as to wealth redistribution such as the ACA. Neither Obama nor Clinton have supernatural powers to get progressive measures passed through republican congress.TheMediaSux , 10 Nov 2016 22:1The Guardian once represented the working class. Not any more.ImaHack , 10 Nov 2016 22:0The next president had been decided. The elites, the lobbyists, the corporate bosses, and the media all decided the next president. Only one thing missing. The voters. They weren't playing ball! Those pesky working class voters! Now the media get to pretend they were with us all along!
Could Bernie Sanders have beaten Trump?freeandfair , 10 Nov 2016 22:0https://newrepublic.com/minutes/138665/bernie-sanders-beaten-trump
"In an article out today at The Washington Post, Freddie DeBoer makes this case. He points out that Sanders during the Democratic primary won in key states, like Michigan and Wisconsin, that Clinton lost in the general, and that Sanders was able to attract independent voters. He also notes Sanders's higher favorability and popularity ratings. Of course, such arguments are entirely speculative. We don't know how Sanders would have fared under Republican attacks. And we can't forget that Sanders lost the primary, by a not insignificant amount.
"But one of the biggest arguments made by Clinton and her supporters was that she was pragmatic and electable-the safe candidate. Sanders's campaign, with its proposals for a $15 minimum wage and universal health care, was derided as pie-in-the-sky, and the candidate himself painted his platform as an electoral disaster. I suspect that more than a few Democrats went with their heads instead of their hearts when casting their votes for Clinton. But we found out that playing a safe and moderate campaign (i.e., picking Tim Kaine, the most forgettable man in existence) doesn't necessarily translate into a winning one. Clinton failed to pick up moderate Republicans and white women. And many of her supporters skated over her extreme unfavorability ratings and her inability to generate excitement.
"There is no concrete evidence that Sanders would have won. But we were sold a candidate who we were told was electable, when most of the signs pointed to the fact that she wasn't."
Democratic party turned into a party of identity politics painting by the numbers. Here is how they assemble their base by pandering to each group specifically:ID8584281 , 10 Nov 2016 21:5
*women - check
*blacks - check
*latino - check
*lgbt -check
*millenials - check
*educated white collar progressives - checkBut then it turns out these groups are not one-dimensional and their voting is not based on just a single identity. They are complex people. And this is how the Democratic voting base splintered. There was no message unifying them.
First Brexit, now Trump ... world politics are not going the way that Guardianistas envisaged!ID8493055 , 10 Nov 2016 21:5
So where has it all gone wrong for the left?
What Rubin says about the democrats abandoning the working class in the US could equally apply to Labour in the UK.
Serves the Washington and London elites f***ing well right, you might say.
But whereas the Washington/New York democrats will just have to lump it, the London elites don't want to accept Brexit because they didn't get the result they wanted, and they will try to do anything to stop it.
If they do, and they might because they will stop at nothing, it will destroy any fleeting idea of democracy in Britain.
And for what?
To remain a member of a corrupt and bankrupt euro project that is running off the rails?
The euro elite is as bent as they come. What they did and are doing to the greeks is unforgivable.
Yanis Varoufakis was against Brexit not because he supports the Brussels autocrats, but because he thinks that the best way to combat the world's biggest threats - i.e., climate change - is through combined efforts (not much point in one country trying to combat climate change on its own if no one else bothers).
The euro project is doomed. The 28 or 30 countries can agree on nothing (response to refugee crisis?), except to punish those that dissentTrump & the GOP don't represent the working class [either]. All the misguided "uneducated, poor white folk" will find that out soon enough when the new regime is allowed to ride roughshod over all the gov't support programs they've relied on.yelzohy gomarj , 10 Nov 2016 21:2Think he served one year and resigned. He was too much of an idealist as came from educational system and could not enough accomplished to justify himself being in that position as per what I saw him say many years ago.Theodore Svedberg gomarj , 10 Nov 2016 21:5Yes Reich was a Clinton appointee. He wrote a book about his four years as Secretary of Labor. It is an interesting read. My take from that book was how Bill gutted labor influence inside his admin.EsKiusmi , 10 Nov 2016 20:3The Clintos and Obama watched as their fellow blue-class and middle class workers were gobbled up by larger and larger corporations, and now they are surprised that they refuse to vote for them? Trumps message to African Americans was simple and so painfully true: "Vote for me, what do you have to lose?". In the end, most voters decided "what do I have to lose?"Beatsong EsKiusmi , 10 Nov 2016 20:3And now they're about to find out . . .Gorgon Mashovic ID8493055 , 10 Nov 2016 22:2Because four million people voted for someone even more right wing then trump. If you think Gary Johnson is a supporter of expanded government services, then you're entirely unfamiliar with his career as new mexico's governor.Bogdanich , 10 Nov 2016 20:2Thomas Ferguson granted an interview this morning. In it he said,Theodore Svedberg Bogdanich , 10 Nov 2016 20:5(in a paper from 2014 he predicted that) "Hillary Clinton would have a lot of trouble putting together the old coalition of effectively Wall Street and if you'll allow me to speak quickly and directly for the sake of communication, identity politics. They're really interesting to study. You can see for example in the white college age women that Hillary only got 6% more of those than Trump did which is sort of unbelievable. But let me come to what I think is probably the heart of the matter. I think we really are at the end of the classical democratic formula of the Clinton period which was Wall Street plus identity politics. I think this is it. You're never going to be able to put that humpty dumpty back together again. If the democrats want to win they're going to actually have to make a strong appeal to working class Americans. Now you know the problem this is going to create. There's a ton of money in the democratic party. It is not going to sit there and tolerate candidates like Sanders. They just really despised and hated Sanders. So we're now going to have a very interesting situation where you've got a top heavy party with cash at the top and no mass at the base at all, or very little."
The interesting thing about Ferguson is he doesn't speak or write that often as he dislikes arguing, but when he does come to a conclusion he is willing to share he is seldom wrong.
I think you, Reich and Ferguson are spot on. It is very hard to argue against "identity" politics since it is basically arguing that minorities (racial, sexual, religious, whatever) have rights. Unfortunately these "identity" groupings somehow left out the working class. So the Democratic Party ended up representing a coalition that involved Wall Street (at its center) and many other small minority groups. What was left out of this coalition was any voice for the working class. Now that is a classical example of divide and conquer. And yes this is a case of the big money of capitalism dividing America's workers.macmarco , 10 Nov 2016 19:5Fifty years ago organized labor unions had a seat at the table who could speak for American workers (whatever small group the individual worker may have belonged to). Today that is gone. Hopefully in the coming years the Democratic Party can restore its roots and begin to represent that class of Americans who actually work for a living. These workers can be divided into hundreds of different groups -- white, black, male, female, straight,gay, wonks, blue collar, hispanic, many others. But together they can have a voice in the national dialogue. If electing Trump is the way to educate the Democratic Party honchos on what is required then perhaps Trump's win will serve a useful purpose.
Bill Clinton moved the Democratic Party to the right. Although rejected by the GOP (racism) Obama continued that move. Hillary could have easily won the election by reaching out to the millions disenfranchised for more than 30 years, but failed to do so. What and who made her stick to a campaign of 'Not Trump' and elitism is puzzling but not an enigma.murnau , 10 Nov 2016 19:4My guess is Bill and Wall Street created the plan, and it went down in a blaze.
"Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more".Trigz , 10 Nov 2016 19:1A good article which explains the route the Democrats have taken over the years. Faced with the Republican victories of Ronald Reagan from 1981-1989 the democrats chose to move to the right, the party having a previous lineage with ordinary workers back to FDR and further. Bill Clinton in 1992 took onboard the third way calling itself the New Democrats. In the UK Tony Blair copied this following on after the tories Margaret Thatcher and John Major with his New Labour transformation of the party into a virtual copy of the tories.
Just like the 2010 election in the UK with Labour, many people who would have voted Democrat simply did not turn out for Hilary Clinton and did not vote at all. With complete establishment backing including Wall Street and the MSM she lost to Donald Trump. Many would have voted for him anyway but a sizeable percentage must have used him as an anti Clinton vote. Jill Stein called Hilary Clinton corrupt. Clinton is a war hawk she supported the Iraq war and doesn't appear to have learnt from the disaster as she was mainly responsible for the catastrophy in Libya. She loves to boast, we came, we saw, he died, meaning Col. Gaddafi she is more reserved about the later deaths of the ambassador Christopher Stevens and some of his colleagues in the Libyan embassy as a direct result of supporting the jihadis. While still secretary of state she said that she would arm anyone fighting against President Assad thats turned out well. She supported the coup in Honduras and was instrumental in laying the ground out for the coup in Ukraine. The recent wikileaks indicated she knew the Saudis were financing ISIS but she said nothing as they were contributing to the Clinton Foundation.
Hillary Clinton Lies About Attending Bilderberg While In Denver
http://wearechange.org/hillary-clinton-lies-attending-bilderberg-denver /
An excellent analysis. Clinton was an awful candidate. She represents the establishment in every possible way; the same establishment that has stood shamelessly by while the US working and middle classes have been abandoned.Mohammed Wong durable13 , 10 Nov 2016 18:3She offered precisely nothing other than not being Donald Trump. Her campaign resembled a coronation. This sheer hubris and arrogance cost the Democrats the presidency. Forget the tiresome shrieks of racism and fascism for a minute: Trump won because Clinton failed to get support among the masses of underemployed and unemployed industrial working class in the Rust Belt; because she offered nothing new, no answers other than more of the same.
They failed to address the very real concerns and fears of everyday Americans. They have no one to blame but themselves for this disaster.
Nonsense.The article nails it. A failure to address the Economic Vampirism that Clinton champions.Sure, there are plenty of racists and misogynists in the GOP, but willfull ignorance couched in identity rhetoric is how the party lost so much.until establishment dems realize that, things will continue to get bleaker for them.Stefan Mochnacki , 10 Nov 2016 18:2This is a very good article, but it doesn't pay enough attention to the human, emotional aspect of political leadership. The really sad thing is that the Democrats had somebody in Bernie Sanders who could have beaten Trump, as all polls earlier this year indicated, but the determination of Hillary to be President combined with the vast web of Clinton connections led to the result we have. Everybody knew about her problems going into the primary campaign, but the attraction of electing a female President combined with unease with Sanders' roots and radicalism (actually, not such big difficulties) led to her rock-solid "super-delegate" support and sufficient voter support in the primaries. I doubt the DNC "dirty tricks" were quite enough to cause Sanders' defeat, but the Party establishment support no doubt swayed some voters, too. Unfortunately, Sanders will be too old to carry the torch, as is Elizabeth Warren; they should now lead the battle in the Senate and write the books so needed to shape American progressive thought in the coming years. The Democrats need to completely rebuild, so that in eight years they can be ready again for executive power, with the essential support of Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress. It's not worth their while winning the Presidency without control of Congress. It means building a real party, a social movement and organization, not just a label, with leaders who can connect emotionally with citizens.voxusa , 10 Nov 2016 18:1"Bill Clinton and Barack Obama helped shift power away from the people towards corporations..."?Tucsonian OptPrime , 10 Nov 2016 19:3What about the landslide shift of power to corporations, lobbyists, and the rich under the Bush and Reagan regimes?
I always agree with you, Mr Reich, and gain insight from your writings/columns, but I think you're really missed the boat here. A demagogue told the big lie to people, and many bought it!
For all the Democrats' (many shortcomings), the BLAME for the sad state of the middle-class, working class, and non-1% is on the Republicans' heads!
And the war on unions is one of the right-wing's key rallying points
You need to explain that assertion.dongerdo , 10 Nov 2016 16:4But let me make a related one:
Clinton is at least partly responsible for Brexit.
1) She led the US into invading Libya. Persuaded Obama, who was initially against it, and now calls it his biggest mistake as president.
2) As Gaddafi predicted, his regime was the "cork in the bottle of Africa" (Assange's words) since Libya was patrolling the region. Removing him opened the first front of the European migrant crisis.
3) Destabilizing Libya provided a base for ISIS and other factions, which helped destabilize Syria, opening the second front of the European migrant crisis.
4) The European migrant crisis was one of the primary drivers of Brexit.
Well regular Joe Blow has been mocked and ignored for years. Joe Blow might not live in a trailer park, he might have some nice house but he and Jane Blow are working double shifts to pay for it. Joe and Jane have long given up on politics because 'it does not change a thing anyways', they have never seen a politician outside the election phase to descend to their rather unremarkable town in the middle of nowhere. Unions are nowhere to be seen, no one actually gives a damn about them and no one listens to their concerns.tigerfisch , 10 Nov 2016 16:3
But they understand. They do not have a college degree so those people from NY or Detroit might be right that they do not understand the big picture, watching the news they see that their elected officials have much more important things to take care of. Gender neutral bathrooms, organizing community hours to paint the safe space at the nearby college, giving debt and tax reliefs to the same banks threatening the two of them to foreclose their house, apparently they are really busy.
But now, after years, someone is coming around and listens. He might not really care and only pretend to but he DOES listen. For the first time ever.And we really wonder about the outcome of this election?!
Reich's article pretty much nails it. The Democratic bigwigs preferred the company of corporate fat cats, facilitated their greed and lost touch with their base....Bob999 , 10 Nov 2016 16:1This is one of the few articles that provides any insight into the 2016 presidential election. The reality is that Americans don't like either political party and don't trust politicians. American voters identify with political parties far less than voters in other countries, and most Americans assume that politicians are crooks. That's just the way it is.TettyBlaBla Bob999 , 10 Nov 2016 21:1Presidential candidates hire consultants to provide marketing expertise to their political campaigns. Trump, by contrast, is himself a marketing expert. As a young man in his twenties, he had the insight that he could increasing the value of real estate by branding it, just as luxury automobiles are branded.
The people who have been mocking Donald Trump for being a real estate magnate and reality show TV impresario fail to realize that those are pursuits where it is impossible to succeed without understanding what the consuming public wants. Many people find Trump to be outrageously offensive, but that is part of a persona he has developed over decades in his property development and TV enterprises in order to attract large numbers of people to his golf courses and hotels, and to attract viewers to The Apprentice.
In politics, Trump's persona translated into a vicious political style that led his opponents to focus on his persona rather than his message. The message was that the increasing deemphasis on national borders (in the form of globalized trade, illegal immigration, and arguably even international terrorism) should be dialed back because it is changing America for the worse. That message resonated with a large number of people and resulted in his election.
Throughout the 2016 election cycle, Trump's opponents failed to address his message and focused instead on his persona. Every opponent who tried to take out Trump by attacking his outrageous and offensive persona was destroyed in the process. During the Republican primary, candidates were talking about Donald Trump so much that they were defining themselves in terms of Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton made the same mistake the 16 unsuccessful Republican primary candidates made. Her campaign was a social message that used Donald Trump as a bogeyman.
The appeal to social interest groups did not address the objective and important issues that Trump was (arguably inarticulately) articulating, which are the issues that really attracted voters to him attracted voters to him. Like Britain, America has a lot of towns where the local economy has been destroyed by the closing of, for example, a steel mill. Trump knew how to address the voters in those towns, and that's how he got elected.
The missing piece from your comment is Trumps use of media that was relatively new compared to prior presidential elections. In Trump's case this was Twitter and Twitter bot accounts re-tweeting messages to smartphones. Obama did well harnessing social media, just as Reagan used taped video feeds appearing to be live (have to remember how primitive color transmissions were not that long ago), Kennedy used television, and earlier presidents won harnessing radio.Bob999 TettyBlaBla , 11 Nov 2016 15:2That is true, as well. Trump's campaign was arguably the American equivalent of the Twitter revolutions that swept North Africa and the Ukraine a few years ago. One question is whether that use of social media is why Trump won or whether it is more narrowly why his win was not predicted by pollsters. This may also be relevant to the unexpectedness of the results of the Brexit referendum.saltchunkmary , 10 Nov 2016 16:1It's also a reminder to those who shout "power to the people" in the expectation that empowered people will return a particular result. With Trump, and with Brexit, the people appear to have repudiated those who see themselves as empowerers of the people. It's worth some reflection.
This is an excellent article. In a perverse way it was those zealously anti Trump wailers who unwittingly made him the 45th president of the USA.David Perry saltchunkmary , 10 Nov 2016 16:2Words of wisdom for those disappointed by the result: Understand why those who voted for Trump did. Don't just write them all of as racist/xenophobic. The majority are not. They are angry because politicians, including and especially those Democrats who were supposed to be on their side, sold their souls to the devil - globalisation, big corporations etc.
In fact one may argue that Bill Clinton signing the NAFTA free trade agreement back in 1994 sowed the seeds for this current situation. Think about it
Exactly! These people are suffering, and instead of getting help from the Democratic Party they were just all labeled as a bunch of racists, xenophobes. homophobes, etc. Most people who voted for Trump didn't vote for the man. They voted for the hope that they could take their country back from a bunch of elitist, corporatists, and rich bankers who have stolen it from them. You aren't going to win them back by denigrating them further.Michael McBrearty , 10 Nov 2016 16:1Yet the mainstream media will persist in explaining the Trump disaster in terms of race or gender issues, never in terms of economic class.Dunbar1999 , 10 Nov 2016 16:0
This is how they keep us divided.Yes. I live in rural Missouri, and I absolutely agree with this analysis. The bit that worries me is that none of the embryonic "plans" suggested by Trump -- the wall, the deportations, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act -- will do anything but make the less well-off less well-off in every way. Does anyone really believe, for example, that lowering the tax on business will induce any businessman with any sense to rebuild an old factory in a small, crumbling midwestern town with an uneducated workforce? Let alone allow a union to form, provide decent salaries, pensions and healthcare like their grandfathers had from companies like Ford, General Motors, Caterpillar, John Deere etc? Of course, there's always a war as a last resort: that used to get the economy going, using up lots of materials and lots of surplus young men, didn't it? But I'm afraid the Chinese don't want to fight us, they want to buy us. There's still so much useable, badly-tended space in the middle of America ...Thatoneguyyouknow Dunbar1999 , 10 Nov 2016 16:1"The bit that worries me is that none of the embryonic "plans" suggested by Trump -- the wall, the deportations, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act -- will do anything but make the less well-off less well-off in every way."Laborequalswealth , 10 Nov 2016 16:0Actually, GETTING ELECTED was the best thing he could have done. At least it's a CHANCE for the Democratic Party to wake the **** up and see the working class (not the WHITE working class, the WHOLE working class) has been slipping away from them and at an accelerating rate. And they are FURIOUS at getting the shaft while their union "leaders" ORDER them to "vote blue no matter who" and are bullied and browbeaten if they so much as DARE to ask what happened to all those empty promises from last campaign season that have been DOWNGRADED yet again into something even smaller and less ambitious, only to be silenced with "the other guys will be the apocalypse so don't you dare ask any questions you dirty racists!"
My husband and two friends and I traveled from SF to Philly to protest the DNC convention.rentierDEATHcult , 10 Nov 2016 15:5The protestors - most of whom were under 35 - were corralled in FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT PARK. The delegates lounged in WELLS FARGO CENTER. They even shut down the subway station used by both groups so that only delegates could use it. They did this even though at the end of the day a torrential electrical storm was drenching the protesters. Nope, folks. That PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION IS FOR THE DNC ONLY.
Did Hillary really think we didn't NOTICE?? Did she think that making FIVE TIMES the average annual income of Americans for a 45 minutes speech to Gold In Sacks would be ignored? That we didn't care that she and Bill RENEGED on the deal with Russia that Bush One made re NATO is pushing Europe to the brink of war? That she loves loves loves the TPP?
Just how fucking stupid did Hillary think we were NOT to notice her Wall Street/MIC worshiping history and positions?
Trump is a domestic disaster. We'll have to deal with that. But I am at least slightly comforted that he wants to stop this war machine (bon chance) and does not support the treasonous, sovereignty-killing TPP - which Hillary SUPPORTED.
The only one who got Trump elected was HILLARY CLINTON and her arrogant followers.
i hope mr reich can help to clear out the faux liberal power elites from the democratic party ... the wall street apparatchiks and senior officials that preside over the various electoral 'plantations' for the clintons: millenials, blacks, lgbt/trans and hispanicsLeonardPynchon , 10 Nov 2016 15:5this type of politics is regressive because it provides cover for vested interests (that derive their wealth through ownership of capital) to colonise democracy against the vast majority of people that depend upon wages for a living
the power structure at the top of the democratic party is corrupt and corrupting ... the way this organisation has sought and cultivated minority votes (not in the pursuit of some higher class goal) but to enhance the career prospects of an 'out of touch' political class on capitol hill is the ultimate form of betrayal
in particular, the way impoverished black communities across america have been used by a 'praetorian guard' of senior black democratic leaders to support the dynastic ambitions of the clinton family must come to an end
it is down to enlightened thinkers like mr reich to ensure that the democratic party transitions from being the 'last plantation owner in america' (and trader in chief of minority votes) towards a champion of working people and their class interests
this would be a good start: i would fire most senior black leaders in the democratic party ... (you know, the likes of donna brazile!) for activities incompatible with representing the class interests of working americans - period
One problem the left has to overcome is the sheer seductiveness of the argument that the Farages and Trumps of this world put forward - they tell those who have not fared well under capitalism that the fault is not their own, that the real problem is immigrants - it is a cynical but effective lie that those who feel left behind find hard to resist.ehmaybe , 10 Nov 2016 15:5In truth the problem is that the system they - Trump and Farage - actually favour is utterly dependent on workers who will work for very little whether they are immigrants or not. The tragic irony is that the right has absolutely no intention of improving the lot of the poor fools who vote for them.
In a multi party parliamentary system the US labor unions and the US' left-leaning social justice voters would not be represented by the same party.Paul Loucks ehmaybe , 10 Nov 2016 16:0
Too many people make the mistake of thinking labor in the US is a left-wing movement. It hasn't been for decades. US labor unions don't fight for workers rights, they fight for their workers pocketbooks and nothing else.
In 1972 labor abandoned the Democrats when they chose a too-progressive candidate for president. Since that time the relationship between progressives and the working class has been a nothing but a marriage of convenience. That marriage seems to have broken up.17% of American indusrtry is union. There wasn't much of a marriage to break up. Factory mechanization was accompanied by moving out of the rust belt into anti-union Southern states. Later, they left for China.ehmaybe Paul Loucks , 10 Nov 2016 16:2The value of unions to Democrats has little to do with the voters in their ranks. Unions have long been the Democrat's counterbalance against Republican wealth - they can't buy as many ads but they can provide nearly unlimited free labor to the Democrats canvassing and telephone campaigns.60boy , 10 Nov 2016 15:4
WIthout unions the Democrats would have even fewer seats in the House and Senate and Woodrow Wilson would probably have been their last president.No, the democrats no longer represent the working classes in the US . As the Labour party here no longer does. I listened to Ed Miliband this morning on the radio and when asked whether he supported Brexit he said he was worried about coloured people, Muslims, transgender and almost everyone else, but he didn't mention the working class at all.KrautOliver 60boy , 10 Nov 2016 16:0
This is why the Tories can get away with doing whatever they want, because Labour is finished in most working class areas. They became a party for minorities and encouraged mass immigration. Now they mean less than nothing to most ordinary, indigenous people in this country!
We don't need a Trump, we've got the Tories and UKIP instead!ene Adair , 10 Nov 2016 15:4but he didn't mention the working class at all.
That would be because the classical working class is an 1860s-1970s phenomenon. It's not describing any meaningful "class" of people anymore. Some people may "feel" working class, but the truth of the matter is that for everyone who feels that way, there's someone with similar living conditions who doesn't.
While I find much to agree with in analyses like Reich's and Frank's, I find that they tend to romanticize the white working class and ignore the elephants in the room, those being racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and the rest. I feel I can say this because I come from a white working-class background in small-town Arkansas (Bill Clinton's hometown and mine were thirty-five miles apart). Believe me, Robert, there is a virulent strain of racism among many of those folks, and It's something that needs to be better addressed by analyses such as yours and Tom Frank's. It's not just something that GOP fear mongering conjured out of thin air. It has deep historical roots and cannot be brushed easily aside by discussions based solely on economic arguments. (See, for example, Stacy Patton's article: http://www.damemagazine.com/2016/11/01/why-i-have-no-sympathy-angry-white-men .)IamDolf Gene Adair , 10 Nov 2016 16:0My GF comes from a similar background. I posted this earlier on this thread.Duggi390 Gene Adair , 10 Nov 2016 16:0I know the "working classes" in the USA, especially the midwestern variety. Dumb, ill informed, incurious. Obsessed with macho posturing, weapons, military exploits.
Rampant racism, misogyny, extreme religiosity. Birtherism, creationism, paranoia, you name it. You have to read the anti-Obama and Clinton vitriol from people lke that to believe it. From people who do not have a pot to piss in.
My GF hails from some dot in the middle of nowhere in IA. She describes being raised there as living in a cult. She had to come to Long Island to realise that there actually were still jews alive today. She more or less thought they were like the Hittites and the Sumerians, something you read about in the bible. To this day she loves to watch documentaries on TV because the education she received in school was so poor and narrow minded.A lot of that rascism, xenophobia, homophobia etc is born out of the frustration that the working class find themselves in. Many believe, rightly or wrongly, that foreigners, the LGBTQ community, Arfrican Americans, Latino's, Asians and so on, are given special treatment. These groups have jumped to the front of the cue to reach the American Dream, while the working class have been stuck in line at the back for years and they have become frustrated and angry. It doesn't excuse those views, but if you look at it from their perspective you can see why they hit out.VinceDaFox , 10 Nov 2016 15:4Additionally, these views are held right across the demographic makeup of the US, not just the Working Class.
hopefully once the dust has died down this is the sort of considered writing that we will see in the Guardian - not the ludicrous outpourings of bile we have seen in the past few days.BigPhil1959 , 10 Nov 2016 15:4I listened to the live radio account from the BBC and noted the evident discomfiture as the result differed from the script. At the end of a presidential election the assembled studio experts should have more to say about a candidate than bewailing perceived racism, perceived misogyny (I doubt that Trump is a true misogynist!) and Mexican walls yet listening to the BBC since then it's as if the programme presenters are working to a script. Likewise. I'm afraid, The Guardian.
What I find truly remarkable is the analogous positions of Trump and Corbyn: both outsider candidates who relied on votes from outside their respective Establishments to win through. Trump had little to do with the Republicans in the past. Corbyn was best known for voting against his party. Both have been reviled by their own party elites (and by the Guardian). Corbyn has faced a coup rumoured to have been organised from outside the PLP. Leading Republicans wore the fact that they had not voted for their own candidate as a badge of honour. Of course this was solely intended to save their political necks, but in the event did no harm whatsoever to Trump or Corbyn - indeed it may have positively assisted them. Had Corbyn been positively endorsed by say, Harriet Harman, he would possibly never have survived.
The US and UK political elites set great store by their acceptance of other faiths and ethnicities yet seem curiously intolerant to the outsiders in their own milieu.
Clinton, Blair and Schroeder came up with the third way. Snake oil salesmen that all profited from sucking up to the corporations and selling their influence. Schroeder signed a deal with the Russians supply gas to Germany before joining Nordstream the company set up to do so. As for Clinton and Blair the list is long a sto how they have lined their pockets. The third way has never been about the ordinary working man. Wages have not risen in Germany in real terms for years as they havent in the US. In the UK easy credit has masked the real situation and now peple are suffering.KrautOliver BigPhil1959 , 10 Nov 2016 16:1What Robert Reich has written has hit the nail on the head.
Loafervandross , 10 Nov 2016 15:4Schroeder signed a deal with the Russians supply gas to Germany before joining Nordstream the company set up to do so.
Except he merely served on the supervisory board.
The third way has never been about the ordinary working man. Wages have not risen in Germany in real terms for years as they havent in the US.
"The working man" is waffling. Contrary to propaganda, Schroeder's reforms have contributed massively to Germany not being hit as hard by the financial crisis as others - and contrary to legends, it has improved the situation of the poor. It's the people peddling those legends, devoid of any understanding how the situation was before, who contribute to the unemployed feeling outcast.
It's the 21st century. Wake up. Waffling about the "Working Man" is the same as waffling about Cowboys and believing cattle farming is still being done like in 1850.
Democrats are as much a part of the elite as republicans.muttley79 , 10 Nov 2016 15:4Guardian columnists such as Hadley Freeman, Lucia Graves, Wolff, Abramson, Freedland and company should be forced to read this article. These columnists very rarely if ever talk about the Gilded Age style inequality levels in the West, and the USA in particular. Instead it is all about identity politics for them. Can these individuals start writing about the disastrous chasm between the very rich and the rest please?hexotic muttley79 , 10 Nov 2016 15:5Definitely. Identity politics has been coopted by the neoliberal technocracy to divert attention from wealth inequalities, the operation of big corporations in politics and the general lack of democratic accountability in governance.feenix07 , 10 Nov 2016 15:3Thank you Mr Reich. Best article I have read for months.Ahnaf15 , 10 Nov 2016 15:3The vote for Trump was a protest vote. It was a non violent revolution. A significant part of the US electorate were angry. They saw their quality of life eroded. They saw little change of their children having a chance of a better life. Trump was the perfect outsider. He was not part of the "corrupt system". If you are living on your knees why not vote for someone who might bring the whole corrupt rotting edifice crashing down?
THe usual media suspects have been trying to explain what happen in their normal closeted, university educated, urban, smug, condesending manner. But when people are angry, when they are protesting they want action, they want change , they don't want the status quo. During the French revolution the mobs didn't ask "whats your policy on gender based minorities?"...they just shouted "off with their heads"
Until the media, the politicians, the policy makers, the wealthy elite start properly listening to the people left behind, then we will continue to see more Trumps and Brexits.
Excellent analysis . Mr Reich was Labour secretary under Clinton and so she shares the responsibility of his policies. Of note is media complicity including so called liberal progressive media no heavy weights. It seems that 'generating ' money / growth/ markets etc etc seem to be the all important factors . Citizens' solidarity and the needs of the most vulnerable are at the bottom of the checklist if it is ther at all. These progressives have fallen or perhaps fallen into the trap of believing that talking about 'progressive' topics e.g. misogyny and gender etc is enough to earn the badge of 'progressives and liberals '.corund , 10 Nov 2016 15:3It is very strange indeed in the midst of all this ther is no mention of JC and McDonnel and co and their ' old 'foolish' 'defunct' types of policies that no one wants to vote for because .......
Finally it is curious to note that many US citizens voted for Trump because of the disillusionment with political establishment. The odd thing is that ' those in the know ' did not know about their anger -- To complicate matters further and using this an example does US and the West really know what ordinary citizens in Afghanistan, Iraq and the rest of ME Asia and Africa really think about the ruinous roles of the West in making their lives and their children's lives and their countries and their future a waste . Just because ther are strategic and national security and economic interests of West and their local reps. Do we have to believe the stories and features of the natives and their 'backgrward ' oppressors or just believe ( as US election showed ) what we want to believe that the natives, want , deserve and should get --
And yes we are in 21 st century and using all the powers of Internet and modern society to be acquainted with the outside world -- Doh --
This article and simon Jenkins article on trump are the best two articles I've read in the guardian for a long time! Spot on .keep reminding people that gw bush supported h. Clinton ,bush whose personal vendetta against Saddam cost thousands of lives ,Iraqi ,us ,UK ,etc! And how million american workers were put on the dole by bill clinton !illJacktheNat , 10 Nov 2016 15:3Thanks for that, Robert.jeanshaw1 , 10 Nov 2016 15:3The Clintons also helped corrupt the Democratic party to deny Bernie Sanders the opportunity to put many of these popular views to the test on Tuesday.
That also meant denying the voters the chance of having someone like Tulsi Gabbard as vice-president:
Exactly. Messrs Thatcher/Major/Blair/Cameron followed the same path here and that is why we have decided that we , the people , want to take back control and showed it by voting to recover our sovereignty by leaving the EU .letrightbedone , 10 Nov 2016 15:3Remember, Trump used to be a Democrat. The fact that he has led the Republicans to peers suggests very little difference between establishment parties, as in the U.K. Trump is a savvy enough schemer to play to the fears and feelings of the dispossed. Let's see what he can deliver. I doubt much. All I can hope is that he recruits right wing Us Supreme Court justices in the vein of Scalia.Hopeabandoned letrightbedone , 10 Nov 2016 16:0Mr Justice Scalia, by his verdict in the Citizens United case, sold US politics to the highest bidder. He and his devout followers have done more harm to their country than any other supreme Court Justice. A man who supposedly believed in the 10 commandments, but who lacked the integrity to hear any death penalty cases. A hypocrite.kjjng1 dvdmartin , 10 Nov 2016 15:4Glass-Steagall, which was used to protect ordinary savers from high risk investment banking, was removed by Clinton, not GWB. Sure, Congress and House were dominated by Republicans, but the Democrats had Bill Clinton and could have filibustered (see how effective the Republicans have been since). Instead, Gramm-Leach-Biley passed with bipartisan support. And let's not even talk about NAFTA.FilthyRichBanker , 10 Nov 2016 15:2The Socialist bread van resprayed in a liberalism, neoliberalism, multiculturalism, political correctness, globalism and liberal interventionism pretty colour by the Blairites, the Clintonites and EU political elites, was still the same old failed product under the bonnet.Bilge FilthyRichBanker , 10 Nov 2016 15:3Guaranteed whenever it is taken out on the roads to breakdown and take a Nation or Federal Superstate to the brink of bankruptcy before the passengers(electorate) see it for what it really is - they had been sold a clapped out old banger with a new coat of paint!
UK Socialists, memorably described by Margaret Thatcher as people who when in power always run out of other peoples money, are mostly a well meaning lot, but their bread van which crashed spectacularly in the 1970's and got taken to the scrap yard as beyond repair, was years later deviously bought(hijacked) as a 'damaged repairable', by a small group of liberal metropolitan elite scam artists who had quietly infiltrated the Labour Party.
After a little tinkering under the bonnet(parachuting their own candidates into Labour heartland seats) and a new touchy feely PR paint job, they relaunched it onto the streets as a New Model 'Green' Socialist vehicle, when in reality it just a bunch of second hand car dealers in sharp suits operating an industrial scale 'cut and shut' job scam of Madoff proportions on hoodwinked buyers(the electorate).
Working hand in glove with Goldman Sachs and big business, they made themselves extremely rich but now have a lot to answer for, as they're responsible for the rise of the left and right wing populist genie out of the bottle. Once out, like the inflation genie it is a devilishly difficult task to put back in.
As evidenced by the latest utterances of a beaming Nigel Farage, aka Mr Brexit, following the Trump Presidential winning campaign:
"Brexit, and now Trump, and now the wagons roll on to the rest of Europe for all the elections next year," Farage said, smiling like a cheshire cat. "This is a really exciting time. As someone who has now become a demolitions expert I'm thoroughly enjoying what's going on."
With bold, brash, crass, in your face characters like Trump and Farage at the forefront of the political stage, the next few years, like a fairground ride could be rather wild and bumpy, but never dull.
We live in interesting times --
What so you're saying Trump and Farage lied? ....They're not going to protect our lifestyles and western living standards using left wing socialist protectionism? ....who woulda thunk it?Sal2011 , 10 Nov 2016 15:2It may be a repudiation of the American power structure, or the result of building certain perceptions in the American public over the years by the mainstream media that Trump pounced upon and crudely exploited to the hilt. The US media couldn't steer the beast it had created when it wanted to. Think it's wishful thinking that we're not in for a period of great upheaval, possibly tragedy. We saw what happened during the Bush presidency, an ugly war with a tally of tens of thousands of lives and global financial meltdown. This time it could be much, much worse.Ummmmm , 10 Nov 2016 15:2CaptainHogwash Ummmmm , 10 Nov 2016 15:3The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in "swing" suburbs.
Change "Democratic" for "Labour", "Washington" for "Westminster", "Wall Street" for "the City", and it still rings true. Corbyn and the swing to the left isn't the cause of the crisis, it's a response. What happens with Sanders and his base next will be pivotal.Change globalisation of "Trade" to "Rightwing Politicies" and I think you've hit a home runevaelbee537 , 10 Nov 2016 15:2Compulsory reading for all who formed & remain part of what is described with forensic precision, including many contributing journalist to this paper. To be taken seriously, not immediately denounced, Robert Reich could only put pen to paper with confidence after Trump won so decisively, & why we are still reeling from reality about to unfold from success of the Brexit campaign. Fundamental change in reactionary maverick hands.Kurwenal , 10 Nov 2016 15:1
Both Trump & UKIP/Farage/ Tory right engaged willingly, without shame, in a campaign of authoritarian demagoguery, with elevation of racist, xenophobic sentiments to being new national virtue of saying it as it is.
Existing power structures with their intricate connections, web of back rubbing fundraising, & legislation to enable profit accumulation to continue unhindered by challenges from 'shopfloor' labour groups, failed to see what was under their noses. Insulated, blinkered privileged they dismissed as unelectable what was coming down on them like a ton of bricks.
Great piece, well worth reading more than once.It is more an indictment of the mainstream political parties than the electorates that politicians like Trump, Farage, Le Pen and all the other hate preachers are attracting so much support. It is equally an indictment of the leftist media that they cling to the discredited leaders of the so called centre left parties. But then they have personally done very nicely out of the cozy relationships they have with leaders who are held in as much contempt by the ordinary voters as the misnamed liberal media holds them.Maitreya2016 , 10 Nov 2016 15:1Democrats were once for slavery as well.leadballoon , 10 Nov 2016 15:0IamDolf leadballoon , 10 Nov 2016 15:2That is the most relevant paragraph I've seen here in recent months. exactly the same for the UK Labour party, Nobody with any real prospect of power represents the working class. The only shadows left are the unrealistic promises of Trump, or Brexit that we know will be ignored once the vote is cast. But what else is there?The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in "swing" suburbs.
The "lumpenproletariat" that brought the social democratic parties in europe to power and made the european communist political parties a force to reckon with no longer exist. The old working classes have been superseded by an underclass who do the truly unskilled work, and a middle class, the successful children of the former workingclass who now are nurses, administrators, middle managers, etc.goto100 , 10 Nov 2016 15:0
Steel, mining, ship building, car manufacturing, etc, used to employ thousands or even tens of thousands of people in a single plant. Those days are over. Everywhere. To exclusively focus on the 20% of the population that are truly left behind is political suicide. And why a guy like Corbyn will never see an electoral win.
And then one needs to keep in mind that the American working class are much more right leaning than their european counterparts.Fuck all globalist hellspawn. Fuck all neocons. Fuck all neoliberals. All of them.SoccerPundit WorrierQueen , 10 Nov 2016 15:2First past the post does have benefits e.g., stable governments that last 4-5 years, manifesto's printed up-front rather than debated behind closed doors, prevention of extremist parties achieving influence via balance of power.BarrieJ SoccerPundit , 10 Nov 2016 16:2
UK, USA main two parties are actually 'large tents/broad churches' where multiple views exist rather than narrow dogma.
Democracy is not perfect - but the peaceful transfer of power - in the UK, US is to be commended and not taken for granted.
(ps I agree with gerrymandering in US but that's a result of the States vs Federal system. Also one more thing - FPTP is the only way to choose a President whether by Electoral College or popular vote).Stable governments that don't represent voter's views or needs. Manifestos that are manifestly ignored at the earliest convenience, policies that were never announced or publicised, pursued in the interests of political lobbyists, donors or corporations. Politicians whose default position is to lie if it serves them better than the truth and the electorate offered the only opportunity to dismiss them at the next election, when they can reliably expect to be rewarded with a seat in the Lords or any number of sinecures in the form of directorships and consultancies.PerspectivesPlease , 10 Nov 2016 14:5
The system is not fit for purpose and that's just the way our political class likes it.Thank you! Thank you! Thank you, Secy. Reich. I cannot say enough!Omoikani , 10 Nov 2016 14:4Yes, Sir no one can fool all the people all the time. The Clintons were masters at this game and believed they could get the people to believe that 2+2=5 assisted with their unlimited corporate money, Wall St. influence, and the dissemination of misinformation aided by the media.
There would not have been any need for organizations like Wikileaks, if journalists had a modicum of integrity.
As for the Guardian, it had to have their favorite, and the most corrupt, candidate defeated at the elections resoundingly in order to have voices, the like that of Secy. Reich express his views in this otherwise skewed newspaper. With the increase in corruption in public office, journalistic integrity followed that same path.
The frustration of the people with establishment politics rose to such a level where they did not care even if the opposing non-establishment candidate was Donald Trump or Donald Duck who groped other ducklings.
The Guardian was one of Clinton's loudest barking dogs, following the Goldman Sachs playlist to the letter. Adverse comments BTL about her or the Guardian's election coverage were deleted.CaptainHogwash , 10 Nov 2016 14:4"Democrats once represented the working class. Not anymore "sylvesta34 , 10 Nov 2016 14:4Republicans never represented the working class but the working classes continued to vote them into office.
The destruction of the trade union movement has always been one of the highest priorities for Conservatives – the success they have had in large part due to the concerted efforts of Ronnie and Maggie (who are now engaged in a torrid posthumous affair).
In the UK there is a sinister parallel between zero hour contracts and workers during the depression standing in the streets hoping to pick up a day's work.
Apparently "job security" is a threat to the prosperity of the nation and so it goes on.
Now that the unions have been dealt with the Tories in the UK have set their sights on dismantling the NHS (by incrementally starving it to death) and there is presently nothing to stop them.Trump clearly tailored his message to reach the disenfranchised but unfortunately there doesn't appear to be any evidence that (a) he really cares about them and (b) anything substantial is about to improve their lot.
Its quite ironic that right-wing, neo-lib ideology, created what we have now, and at the same time its the right and far right that are getting all the gains. The popularity of Trump. Farage and this movement tells you how utterly and totally the left and liberals in general have failed in connecting with the working classes and offer something different.Biblio , 10 Nov 2016 14:4Trojans08 Biblio , 10 Nov 2016 14:4Bill Clinton and Barack Obama helped shift power away from the people towards corporations. It was this that created an opening for Donald Trump
Sums things up succintly. If you're concentrating on stealing their clothes, they can steal yours, especially when you only wave them about listlessly yet refuse to wear them.
That's been happening since Reagan. I get the blame on Clinton & Obama in the context of "Dems played the same game as GOP", but not in a more open context. This has been happening for 35 years with trickle down economy. It also happens to "coincide" with the widening of wealth gap...Light_and_Liberty , 10 Nov 2016 14:4It was a repudiation of President Barack Obama and his leftist [neoliberal] policies that decimated middle class jobs, health insurance and the respect for the rule of law.Karl Holder , 10 Nov 2016 14:3A valid point can be stated in one sentence.
Obama just nailed the whole working class with a massive Obamacare rate hike. What did they expect was going to happen? You cannot provide free healthcare to the poor on the backs of the working class while the upper mids and wealthy pay nothing. The upper mids already have employer insurance, people, and they do not get an opinion. OCare is hitting me for $400 a month for insurance with a $13,000 deductible! That is fraud! I am a working class liberal- Obama broke every campaign promise he ever made to us, and Clinton has done nothing to shed her 'corrupt DNC insider' image or distance herself from Obama's treacherous policies. ALL of the reasons the Trump people are giving for voting for Trump are VALID and we can blame this one on THE DNC. BERNIE WOULD HAVE WON.PDXtoNOLA , 10 Nov 2016 14:3I find it poetic that the Guardian, which seemed this past year to be competing with the other US majors in the grotesque sidelining and marginalizing of Bernie Sanders, is now On their hands and knees with their contribution drive. I will never give a dime to these hacks. What's funny is that had they stuck to their principles of fearless reporting I have no doubt a huuuge number of readers would have jumped at the opportunity to make a worthwhile contribution. Like the DNC, they had a clear thoroughbred in the stable and they drowned it in the backyard. i have no sympathy for this rag. I have contempt for it.Bilge , 10 Nov 2016 14:3Trump + brexit means the right have control. OK guys what happens next, what's the plan?RationalGuardianMan , 10 Nov 2016 14:2Just as after Brexit, this paper is flooded with articles claiming how 'minority' groups, BMEs, LGBTQ...s, and even women, are now being attacked in numbers and how vulnerable they feel.NoSerf , 10 Nov 2016 14:1I follow the MSM and have seen nothing of substance that backs this up.
Nor do I feel that Trump is going to mount major campaigns against such groups.
Interestingly I believe it true that 29% of the 'Hispanic' minority actually voted for Trump.
Similarly was the figure for white women not c.50% ?
Many fewer blacks did, but should Trump's economics actually bring back jobs for the 'working class' why would blacks in this group of both (all ?) sexes not benefit also and if that is the case watch how their voting patterns change next time.
Thankfully there are articles like this.Willbeck , 10 Nov 2016 14:1
Media other than Guardian who don't care to give this thought the time of the day, slip into irrelevance. I mean the MSMs here who all embody Trotzkism.
Trotzkism dictates that the livelihoods of people ought to be taken away to make them pliable. China bought US-TBs (for US government aggrandizement) upon US shipping jobs over there. Feeding the hungry? With the Fed going into overdrive. Banks together with govt concocted the financial crisis to profit off bear strategies that mortals can't do. In following years, the elite coined high-flying ideals such as globalization, which is good for them because they sit in govt, teach in universities or are detached ueber-owners of businesses. Joe Blow was screamed at when he would ask: How am I gonna pay for stuff that the big wigs have now manufactured overseas, when we now make, or get as welfare, $10 instead of $25 an hour?
Hard to reverse the destruction, but worth a try.I never thought I would be in agreement with Robert Reich but I am today. Every election cycle the Democratic Party spouts happy talk about being the people's party and the worker's party (in contrast to the supposedly blue blooded, monied Republican Party.) While that may once have been a somewhat accurate portrayal, it has long since become a sham of an image.biologixco , 10 Nov 2016 14:1Today's Democratic Party is the party of the corporate billionaires, the tech titans, and the globalist elitists who don't want a simplistic notion like that of national borders to get in the way of their profit seeking. Naturally, the entertainment and media stars gravitate toward their corporate masters and shill for the Democrats. Throw in a fixation on divisive identity politics and the Democratic establishment and its less loud and proud Republican counterpart thought that the authentic voice of the American people could forever be drowned out. The success of Bernie Sanders (done in by the rigged Democratic Party rules) and Donald Trump demonstrates that the people will no longer be silenced.
Hey GUARDIAN, where is that 99% chance of Hillary winning???meggo56 , 10 Nov 2016 14:1
I personally know three people that didnt vote because they thought she had a win in the bank.
Shame on the Guardian.
Those pollsters along with GUARDIAN should be summarily FIRED.
And don't let the door hit them in the a$$.Thank you for your voice of intelligence & grounded wisdom. As I read elsewhere, the treaties that Mr. Clinton & Obama have backed have unravelled the middle class. And let's not forget Mr. Reagan who reversed high tax rates on the wealthy and broke the back of unions. Neither party represents working people anymore. Certainly Mr. Trump does not. And playing to that disenfranchisement won him the election---but I fear that he has no interest in redeeming the middle class. He was interested in getting elected and telling people anything they want to hear.Bilge , 10 Nov 2016 14:0The western first world dominance is coming to an end. People in the west like to think they are the top of the food chain but reality is the second world of Asia and the far east is rapidly stepping into their shoes. Capitalism dictates that maximum profits are returned for minimum outlay so if you can make a product for minimal cost i.e. wages, and sell for the maximum price then you have a successful business model. Protectionism has been tried before and Trump's version trying to roll back globalisation will be no more successful. ..same applies to brexit. It'll get even worse as robotics take over more and more, the only solution will be social control mechanisms to ensure that suppliers have consumers to sell their products to. It's going to take a while for this realism to sink in...but it's unavoidable.eminijunkie Bilge , 10 Nov 2016 14:1Protectionism is working great in China, and it once did wonders for the US.MalleusSacerdotum , 10 Nov 2016 14:0Free trade is the pathway to poverty for all but the [already] rich.
Sense at last in a Guardian article.LibertineUSA , 10 Nov 2016 13:5
But still not enough sense to say clearly what a weak campaigner and what a poor choice of candidate Hillary Clinton was.Oh well... maybe the Guardian will use the period between now and January 20 to reflect on how they cheer-led for a candidate who didn't have what it takes to win an election.
Or maybe not. Maybe they will continue to print and post stories that are tinged with hurt surprise that democracy means one -and only one- vote for every citizen who cares to cast it. How can democracy function if all those white unemployed and immiserated vote against the candidates that the rich have prepared for them?As is usual Mr. Reich hits the nail squarely on the head.coolook , 10 Nov 2016 13:5The working class had long been the backbone of the Democratic Party electorate. They no longer are because the Democratic Party is no longer the party of the working class. The banks, the upscale suburban liberals, minorities and specific issue oriented groups are the people that matter most to the Democratic Party. The working class support has been taken for granted for far too long by the Dems. I can't remember how many times I have heard said, or seen written, by Democratic insiders "where else do they have to go (for candidates to support)?"
The working class has to be a part, and an important part, of the left's coalition going forward or risk seeing more shock election results like this. Their lots have not improved in this brand new global economy championed by both parties. And while their numbers aren't as large as when Reagan was elected (and before) there are more than enough of them to be an election decider.
It also will be helpful to choose candidates who will not to insult them like who, for example, call them all a "basketful of deplorables".
the biggest factor in the Trump victory,and in the Brexit mayhem,is quite simply Globalization. it is Globalization that has exported jobs,and skills out of the western world. it is responsible for ghost towns in the industrial and manufacturing heartlands. western governments have had no strategy for regeneration on anything like a great enough scale. unless the consequences of globalization are addressed and reversed, the West faces ever falling living standards and huge unrest.simpledino coolook , 10 Nov 2016 19:0Yes, what we call "globalization" is quite simply the universalizing of a certain set of relations between capital and labor -- it's clear that if the process is allowed to proceed without proper safeguards, capital will be greatly favored, while labor will be reduced to the lowest possible level. Marx pointed out a long time ago that the tendency of capitalism is to squeeze the greatest amount of "surplus value" out of the workforce while granting them only as much money as necessary for them to scrape by from day to day. Essentially, under capitalism, he wrote, people exist to produce things and are less important than the things they produce. Marx may have been wrong about the viability of "scientific socialism," but he was often spot-on as an analyst of the way capitalism works and who it really benefits.blackrocket2000 , 10 Nov 2016 13:4Trade is wonderful, but only when it doesn't proceed by reducing us all to wage slaves. Maybe Dems who keep supporting bullshit neoliberal trade deals need to go read some of old Uncle Karl's delightfully sarcastic works. Capital, Vol. 1 would be a fine start: see in particular the chapter, "The Fetishism of the Commodity and the Secret Thereof." It's a masterpiece.
Can anyone turn back the tide of globalisation and power of the corporations? What is the role of MSM? Are they all part of the problem? Interesting times. Maybe Trump will be force for good. We certainly need stronger leadership from our politicians, on both sides of the pond.simpledino stupormundi , 10 Nov 2016 14:1Yes, I think of lot of that sort of stuff is misplaced. True, there are some despicable people supporting Trump -- the Klan, neo-Nazi types, and so forth. But most people who voted for him aren't like that. It's probably more the case that they put aside considerable disdain for Trump's wretched behavior and voted for him based on his promise to "unforget" the working class. Personally, I think he's a brazen demagogue who doesn't give any more of a rat's bottom about the poor and the working class than Hitler did in Germany, what with all his "national socialist" promises of "two chickens in every pot." But it isn't hard to understand the appeal of such populist rhetoric when people are suffering and insecure. The American Left needs to rediscover its proper role as a moderator of the harsher side of capitalism -- it has forgotten that role, and the bill for that forgetfulness just came due. I don't blame Hillary personally -- Secretary Reich is right to frame the problem in much broader terms, i.e. as having to do with the Democratic leadership as a whole.Aboutface , 10 Nov 2016 13:3The business of government has morphed into the government for businesses.Pyrophyte , 10 Nov 2016 13:3
Take a hint from what President Xi of China is doing, in managing the PRC. A good yardstick of good governance comes from the analects of Confucius.What an excellent article.trundlesome1 , 10 Nov 2016 13:2It's the same almost everywhere.
For instance, once upon a time in Germany, social democrats represented the working class. Not anymore. People couldn't care less about Germany's wonderful economic growth either, as most of the surplus goes to the top.*
The "social democrat" Schröder demolished the welfare state and introduced a new low wage sector, much beloved by his corporate buddies. Thanks to his and Angela Merkel's efforts, numbers of working poor and food banks are increasing. So is the wealth gap.* Thanks to an ongoing media hate campaign against the meritocratic losers, most people suffered in silence. And now everyone acts shocked and confused that a right-winged populist party is on the rise.
Well, thank you Angela Merkel, these are the fruits of your beloved austerity. The next vote in Germany is going to be interesting. And just for the record: austerity was employed by Brüning to boot. And that turned out so well, didn't it?
http://www.dw.com/en/study-income-inequality-reaches-new-high-in-germany/a-36009472
Capitalism is the best economic system we have but it becomes increasingly self destructive and unstable if it is not managed properly. The moderate left and right would both agree on this normally but the left would prioritise the interests of workers and the right the interests of capitalists. However both, self interestedly, would support policies and institutions that kept the system stable and growing.Russ Bestley , 10 Nov 2016 13:2Unfortunately hubris and market fundamentalism has turned the right's head and allowed the rich and greedy to destructively run rampant. This is in no-one's longer term interest as the impoverishment of the middle class and destruction of a prosperous mas market will eventually undermine even most of the wealthy. The economic elite need to be dragged back under control. Theodore Roosevelt broke up the trusts in the 20s and Franklin brought in the New Deal in the Great Depression. It has been done before. It needs to be done again.
Now Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America against foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Trump's isolationism will stymie economic growth. But most Americans couldn't care less about growth because for years they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.trundlesome1 , 10 Nov 2016 13:0Exactly, and the parallels with the Brexit vote and against an EU corporate bureaucracy set up to benefit the wealthy are stark. You could apply the same phrasing here in the UK:
Now British voters have rebelled by supporting a campaign that wants to fortify the UK against foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Brexit's isolationism will stymie economic growth. But most British workers couldn't care less about growth because for years they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.
Great article.ThomasD , 10 Nov 2016 13:0The Democrats have more or less sold out the working class to the rich and powerful. They are, in large part, the rich and powerful as this article points out. If the left wants to counter right wing populists such as Trump it will need to address the growing anger of the white working class towards policies that have put them in a position where they will be a minority in their own country where they have historically been a large majority. It will also have to look after the unemployed, working and middle classes at the expense of Wall Street, big tech and big business generally. Ironically the right needs to do exactly the same thing. And both need to do these things while protecting the well-being of minorities. Will these mainstream politicians be able to escape the orbit of the rich? It is difficult to be optimistic.
Maybe so, but the only solution offered here is more Unions... if you think that's a solution to the stagnating earnings of the bottom half of the population then I'm afraid you are way off the mark.epidavros ThomasD , 10 Nov 2016 13:2The problem, and it's one that Trump will utterly fail to address and strikes at the heart of our beliefs, is that a modern economy has little use (and places little economic value) on low and unskilled labour. There is not a thing that can't be done cheaper by foreign factories and machines (computers/robots/automation). This is deeply unpalatable and I do not like it, but without a solution to how we ensure fair treatment of people who are, day by day, becoming less economically valuable to the modern economy, this issue will not go away. Trump is a reaction, but he is not the solution but he will set out to blame every minority, foreign government, trade agreement he can because he can't or won't address this issue, and that will be very bad for everyone.
Its much worse than that. The modern economy places no real value on labour at all. Over the coming years about 1/3 of all jobs are considered at risk of automation, including doctors, lawyers (already happening), journalists (already happening) etc. The liberal elite in some of these jobs are like lobsters in a slowly heating pot - they are too busy congratulating themselves on how toasty warm their situation is to realise what is going on, and so all too happy to applaud the status quo.ThomasD epidavros , 10 Nov 2016 14:1Certainly it's a rising tide that threatens to wash away at everyone, though the higher skilled the safer you are likely to be, at least for now.epidavros ThomasD , 10 Nov 2016 14:2I think the challenges are ultimately going to affect everyone, the question is going to be who benefits politically. The left (which is where my political sympathies lie) is currently in a real funk and lacks meaningful answers, the right is reducing it's message to 'blame the others, they take your job, benefit at your expense etc'. No real answers.
P.S. I think your reference to the 'liberal elite' is misplaced, I'm not sure if the local GP or bloke who writes wills in the local high street really count as an elite, just ordinary people doing relatively well for themselves. The risk in this kind of language is that the tendency is to think they are some kind of other who are to blame for all this, when what's happening is actually far more wide ranging and fundamental.
Liberal elite is a slight. Its not misplaced at all. Wikipedia gets it spot on:Josh Graver , 10 Nov 2016 13:0https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_elite
And the liberal elite are by definition to blame for this because they are the ones whose privilege got them the managerial and leadership positions they hold yet whose ideology and political views have meant they have carried out these roles so badly.
I agree that neither side has the answers because both sides are in effect faces of the same coin, cut from the same metal, imbued with the same flaws. Corbyn no more has answers than Trump.
What Trump has done is prove that no politician can go forward ignoring the questions. Hillary firmly expected to.
Mirrored exactly with the new labour. Billionaires and celebrities rubbing shoulders with the political elite, little wonder why we became disillusioned with them. For years now, the government neglected the working class. Industries and jobs vanished ever since replaced with ZHC jobs and low pay, keeping the broken system going on the back of a 'trickle-down effect' lie.basalte , 10 Nov 2016 13:0The Democrats had their party, Perry turned up, endorsed by lines of celebrities, we are looking back with perplexed bemused expressions. If we elect her, it would be more of the same. The free market shite started off a few decades ago, heavily entrenched by corporations and billionaires, the scandal of offshore trust funds, we are dumped and forgotten.
What struck me as a tourist to San Francisco in 2014 were the sheer numbers of very visible homeless on the streets, begging or just looking beaten . Yet all around them there were mass preparations for the annual Gay Pride celebration. Obviously I am not decrying Gay Pride but the sense of priorities seemed strange and I was forced to think that America is a pretty insane place. It is going the same way here, a lot easier to celebrate identity than to tackle systemic injustice. That used to be Governments` job but they have largely abandoned their historic responsibilities. Time for Labour to bring those fundamental responsibilities back --TettyBlaBla basalte , 10 Nov 2016 22:0All told, San Francisco spends close to three quarters of a Billion dollars every year on "homeless" of which close to $200 million is a specific department and budget item. As such, many flock to San Francisco, which is also well known for lack of enforcement of many laws. Many of the beggars are already housed at taxpayer expense and prefer to generate additional income outdoors on a schedule of their choice, which is where they also purchase and consume items never sold in stores.lotusblue , 10 Nov 2016 12:4The working classes have been stripped of their dignity, whole communities have become wastelands and virtual ghettos. The working class don't trust the left to sort things out for them and that is why and how a figure like Trump can come along and say 'I will save you all' and become President. Meanwhile, the socialist left sit around scratching their heads, unable to work out what has happened and squabble about the spirit of socialism and ideology that in all honesty, most working class people don't give a toss about. They just want jobs that pay a decent wage, a nice house to own, nice food on the table, two cars and nice holidays. They want to be middle class in other words.marjane52 lotusblue , 10 Nov 2016 12:5But democrats are not left. They right wing too. If Americans think that Democrats are left, they don´t know what left is at all. And what socialist goverment has USA had. I see Americans saying tthat Democrats are socialists, really?.Hillary left and socialist?. Trump and Hillary are both right wing, only that Trump is more extreme.BlessedCheesemaker , 10 Nov 2016 12:4petermhogan , 10 Nov 2016 12:3A respected political insider recently told me most Americans were largely content with the status quo. "The economy is in good shape," he said. "Most Americans are better off than they've been in years."
The political elite of *both* parties are completely out of touch with the citizenry. The economy has been restructured over the last 20-30 years to completely de-value labor and prioritize the rich and corporations.
Having said that, I believe people just want to be heard. Voting for Trump was seen as voting against the status quo, and voting for Hillary was voting for the big establishment. Much like Brexit, I don't think voters were thinking through the long-term consequences of their decision.
Monday morning quarterbacking of the worst kind. That the Democrats have lost the white working class is obvious. But to blame the Democrats, such as Hillary, is misplaced. It is the Dems who have attempted to help the working poor and propose improvements in health care and child care and tax redistribution. It is not a lack of concern that is the issue. What Reich ignores is that voters are voting an ideology and not self-interest. They have bought into the notion that getting rid of immigrants and taking care of the rich will solve all problems.Justanotherwageslave , 10 Nov 2016 12:3
The voters had a clear choice and they chose the demagogue peddling a non-solution. They wanted to believe that they are wonderful people and problems can be solved by a wealthy idiot who promises to turn the clock back. In Democracy sometimes it is the voters who get it wrong.The analysis is correct more of less , the issue here is class , the Republicans and Democrats are the two wings of the same party. The party of property and money and the powerful , the vote for Trump is one of those events that happens much like Obama being elected twice after the Republicans stole the two previous elections via the supreme court and election fraud. It can happen but the system remains the same , there is no serious challenge to the supremacy of the ruling class.Minorityreported , 10 Nov 2016 12:1The one analysis you will not hear in the media is a class one and if it is then it will be howled down lest it gain currency and the wage slaves realise they have been conned yet again , Trump is not unusual in his attitudes or views , it's just that the campaign gave them wide publicity.
In the UK the same kind of thing has happened to Labour , they lost Scotland and the 2010 election and the remain vote because ordinary working people are tired just as they are in the US of seeing the rich get every richer and their own living standards fall and nothing in the future but more pain and misery. They vote UKIP/SNP here as a cry in the wilderness and they voted for Trump for the same reason because they aren't what they've had before , the real problem will come when the right wing populists have been in power for a while and nothing has really improved.
For the last thirty years, there has been no left or right wing governments - not economically or fiscally. Third way centrism (liberal progressiveness) embraced the primacy of unfettered market capitalism and corporate globalism, and focused exclusively on using political power as a tool to win the culture war instead. That's fine if you've done materially very well out of unfettered market capitalism and corporate globalism, and all that therefore matters to you is social justice issues. But if you were once in a secure job with a decent income and decent prospects for your children, and all of that has been ripped away from you by unfettered market capitalism and corporate globalism, and the people responsible for preventing that - or at least fixing it when it happens - are more concerned with policing the language you use to express your fears and pain, and demonstrating their compassion by trying to improve the life chances of people on other continents, then social justice issues become a source of burning resentment, not enlightenment. There has been a crushing rejection of globalism and corporate plutocracy by Western electorates. The Western progressive left will only survive if it has the courage to recognise that, and prioritises the fight for economic and fiscal policies that promote the interests and prospects of its own poor and middle class, over and above the cultural issues that have defined it for a quarter of a century. We should always remain vigilant, but the truth is that the culture war is won. It would be tragic beyond words if that victory was reversed by an explosion of resentment caused by the left's determination to guard old battle fields, while ignoring the reality that its thinkers and activists are needed to right new injustices. Trump's success doesn't represent the victory of hate over hope, it just represents the loss of hope. The left has to see that or its finished.HHeLiBe , 10 Nov 2016 12:1The Guardian had a very interesting article on Bill Clinton's culpability for mass incarceration of drug users, mainly Afro-Americans.ECullen DrMcNounVerber , 10 Nov 2016 16:4It is really questionable whether they represent liberalism.
It's not quite as simple as that. Some things like clothes are certainly still made by people (in horrific conditions for terrible pay) but more and more factories are automated with a bare skeleton staff running the show. The BBC series 'Inside the Factory' was an eye opener for me. The UK food manufacturing industry for example is heading toward almost full automation - I'd imagine the US industry is even further down the automated road. This is why the UK and US have moved to services and these areas are the vast bulk of unskilled jobs now.Quint Red , 10 Nov 2016 12:1Bootsy_Collins Quint Red , 10 Nov 2016 12:3The Democratic party once represented the working class
Now it sneers at them as a "basket of deplorables". The same has happened in the UK; only this morning Owen Jones was asking the left to reach out to the working class, and in the very same article labelled them as racist, misogynist homophobes.
The consequences of this disdain are entirely predictable
Re: "basket of deplorables" -- if you care about accuracy, she didn't sneer at them as a basket of deplorables; she sneered at *half* of them as a basket of deplorables. In the same paragraph, she described the other half as having legitimate concerns that weren't being addressed.EdmundLange , 10 Nov 2016 12:1As far as her criticisms of half of Trump's voting base -- politically, stupid as hell. But valid? Well, what do carefully-taken public opinion polls from the 15 months before the election tell us? 2/3 of Trump supporters believe Obama is a Muslim who was born in another country. 63% want to amend the Constitution to eliminate citizenship for people born in the U.S. 40% consider African-Americans lazier than white people. A third of Trump supporters believe that the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW2 was a good thing. 31% believe in banning homosexuals from entering the United States. A quarter of them believe that Antonin Scalia was murdered in a conspiracy. A quarter believe that vaccines cause autism. 16% believe that whites are a superior race, and another 14% just aren't sure.
I don't see a very strong case that she was wrong.
It's the same problem the UK had with brexit. People feel squeezed, invariably because of neoliberalist policies that benefit the wealthy, and the rising wage and wealth gap drives resentment because of it.PSmd Captain_America , 10 Nov 2016 13:0Suddenly, you get populists who spring up with "solutions" to such problems, but rather than being actual solutions seem to scapegoat totally unrelated factors, such as immigration, free trade, power blocs, specific groups of people who may be out of favour at the moment, rather than the actual correct causes in the first place.
Your post actually chimes with what I've been saying. There was a big moment for the left, that came in 2008 in the USA. A mixed race opponent of the Iraq War, sounding plausibly leftish leaning, praised public healthcare, accused relentlessly by the right of being a communist/socialist, of being a muslim, of not born in the USA. And he won. So only 8 years ago, there was a moment where American electorate shifted left, it'd seem. But instead Obama brought back Rubin, Summers, Geithner, same old 1990's wall street cabal. FDR he was not.There'll be a moment within a decade for things to move left, who will head 'the left' (Clinton and Blair types?) will tell whether things actually do move in that direction.
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Nov 11, 2016 | http://crookedtimber.org/2016/11/09/what-can-we-do/#comment-697744
Howard Frant 11.10.16 at 1:41 am 138I talked to an elated Trump voter today. She had little to say about Trump, other than "Give him a chance." No, her elation was at the defeat of Hillary, and the attendant possibility that opened up to get rid of the corruption in Washington. Specifically, she adduced the Clinton Foundation, with its $600,000 salary to Chelsea Clinton, and Hillary's receipt of cash from Saudi Arabia and Morocco, as well as complaining about Benghazi and something that I took to be death panels.
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Nov 11, 2016 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
mcdee November 10, 2016 at 5:52 pm
ProNewerDeal November 10, 2016 at 5:54 pmThe savaging of the Rust Belt by NAFTA costs Clinton MI, OH, IN, WI and PA and Haitian refugees cost her FL. How fitting. Karma IS real.
TK421 November 10, 2016 at 7:03 pmHClinton outspent (campaign + SuperPACs) Trump by 45% ($534M to $367M per the election Wiki page, given preliminary FEC reports currently available) in the election, yet lost. Perhaps the most clear sign as to what a horrible candidate HClinton was, both in policies & campaign tactics.
When was the last Pres election the top fundraiser did NOT win? How many times has this happen, say since the 1980 Reagan election or since the 1948 post-WW2 election? IIRC, Thomas Ferguson with his Investment Theory of Politics shows that in the vast majority (90%+ ?) of US elections (Fed/State/Local), the biggest fundraiser wins.
I don't think s happened in a presidential election since WWII.
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Nov 11, 2016 | crookedtimber.org
bob mcmanus 11.10.16 at 1:45 pm I thought someone above talked about Trump's rhetoric
1) Tom Ferguson at Real News Network post at Naked Capitalism says (and said in 2014) that the Democratic coalition of Wall Street (Silicon Valley) + Identity Politics is imploding, because it can't deliver populist goodies without losing part of it's core base.
Noted no for that, but for my equation of Neoliberalism (or Post-Capitalism) = Wall Street + Identity Politics generated by the dematerialization of Capital. CDO's are nothing but words on paper or bytes in the stream; and identity politics has much less to do with the Body than the culture and language. Trumpists were interpellated as White by the Democrats and became ideological. Capital is Language.2) Consider the above an intro to
Lauren Berlant at the New Inquiry "Trump or Political Emotions" which I think is smart. Just a phrase cloud that stood out for me. All following from Berlant, except parenthetical
It is a scene where structural antagonisms - genuinely conflicting interests - are described in rhetoric that intensifies fantasy.
People would like to feel free. They would like the world to have a generous cushion for all their aggression and inclination. They would like there to be a general plane of okayness governing social relations
( Safe Space defined as the site where being nasty to those not inside is admired and approved. We all have them, we all want them, we create our communities and identities for this purpose.)
"Sanders and Trump inflamed their audiences with searing critiques of Capitalism's unfairness. Then what? Then Trump's response to what he has genuinely seen is, analytically speaking, word salad. Trump is sound and fury and garble. Yet - and this is key - the noise in his message increases the apparent value of what's clear about it. The ways he's right seem more powerful, somehow, in relief against the ways he's blabbing."
(Wonderful, and a comprehension of New Media I rarely see. Cybernetics? Does noise increase the value of signal? The grammatically correct tight argument crowd will not get this. A problem I have with CT's new policy)
"You watch him calculating, yet not seeming to care about the consequences of what he says, and you listen to his supporters enjoying the feel of his freedom. "
(If "civil speech" is socially approved signal, then noise = freedom and feeling. Every two year old and teenage guitarist understands)
"But Trump's people don't use suffering as a metric of virtue. They want fairness of a sort, but mainly they seek freedom from shame. Civil rights and feminism aren't just about the law after all, they are about manners, and emotions too: those "interest groups" get right in there and reject what feels like people's spontaneous, ingrained responses. People get shamed, or lose their jobs, for example, when they're just having a little fun making fun. Anti-PC means "I feel unfree."
The Trump Emotion Machine is delivering feeling ok, acting free. Being ok with one's internal noise, and saying it, and demanding that it matter. Internal Noise Matters. " …my emp
Noise again. Berlant worth reading, and thinking about.
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Nov 11, 2016 | crookedtimber.org
engels 11.11.16 at 1:43 am 243
I watched one of Trump's last speeches before the election. In it, he said, "Tomorrow, the working class takes back this country." I was struck. No contemporary Democratic politician would (or could, credibly) say those words. Afraid of scaring off their donors or being red-baited, most Democrats won't even utter the phrase "working class"-preferring the capacious and increasingly meaningless "middle class" or, at best, "working families."
But Trump said it. His rural and exurban white supporters have a class consciousness of sorts. They despise elites. They feel that the system is rigged. But that antipathy is entirely entangled with their fear of a black president, of eroding racial and gender hierarchies, and their perception that multi-cultural elites are helping minorities at their expense. Trump can say "working class" because everyone in his audience hears the unsaid word "white" preceding it. It is, as it has ever been, the left's task to build a mass political movement where there are no words silently preceding the term "working class." It's not hyperbole to say that everything depends on it.
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Nov 11, 2016 | crookedtimber.org
kidneystones 11.11.16 at 10:19 am 265 ( 265 )
I'm going to be as diplomatic as I can about the lack of gravitas clearly displayed in the comments here as I can, whilst at the same timing reviewing some of the data that many clearly missed.One of the key reasons I remained confident that Hillary would lose irrespective of what the FBI did, or did not do, if you're interested, is that I was keenly interested in the attitudes of African-American voters from the outset of this election. As I've said throughout, I do not regard Trump as a 'Republican' in anything like the conventional sense of the word, but rather see him as a New York celebrity vulgarian with liberal inclinations. Trump from the outset had a clear plan to appeal to African-American voters, even it was far from fleshed-out. And given the 'of course, African-American voters will support the Democrat' attitude of practically every white supporter of Hillary, I was confident Trump wouldn't need much of a plan beyond saying: 'vote for me, what have you got to lose?' to do fairly well no matter how badly he was smeared.
Turns out I was right. Low black turn-out numbers in key states, such as Michigan, NC, and Florida came as no surprise to me because I watched Leslie Wimes one week before the election explain that it was 'already over' for Hillary in Florida.
Not one to mince words, Ms. Wimes, who voted early for Clinton, reports that she warned the Clinton campaign and the DNC as early as September that black voters in Florida were not, repeat not, going to be turning out in sufficient numbers to permit Hillary to carry this critical state. But nobody wanted to hear. Funny, that.
Maybe some would like to listen to Ms. Wimes now.
Layman 11.11.16 at 11:13 am 266 mclaren: "No, what I was pointing out is that the two candidates who set the electorate on fire were the two populist candidates, Trump and Sanders."
You're abusing the term 'the electorate'. 'The electorate' in a primary (or a caucus!) is a different thing than 'the electorate' in a general election, and results in one don't translate into results in another. The point of the Obama Idaho 2008 example is this: Obama beat Clinton by 60 points in that caucus, but this did not mean he was going to win Idaho in a general election, and in fact he got trounced there in the general election. This is because, again, 'the electorate' is a different thing in those two contests. No one knows if Sanders would have done better in this general election, and primary results don't provide an answer to that question.
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Nov 11, 2016 | crookedtimber.org
likbez 11.12.16 at 3:01 am 288
Sorry, but I do not see in this thread any attempt to discuss Hillary extreme militarism and jingoism as well as attempt to make Russophobia a part of the platform of the Democratic Party, effectively positioning it as yet another War Party.
In some areas of foreign policy Hillary looks like John McCain in the pantsuit. There is no military intervention that she did not like, and she was always prone to the most hawkish positions on any war related issues, trying to outdid her male counterparts in jingoism, as if overcompensating her hidden sense of inferiority.
That might be another negative factor affecting the elections results. Few people outside military industrial complex lobbyists are exited about the possibility of unleashing WWIII (for example via enforcing "no fly zone" in Syria) even with conventional weapons. And a lot of people, especially among more educated part of electorate, still remember her role in the destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria. Especially the latter ( moonofalabama.org)
The people loyal to the Syrian government are happy with Donald Trump winning the U.S. election:
At the passport counter, a Syrian officer's face lit up when he saw an American traveler.
"Congratulations on your new president!" he exclaimed, giving an energetic thumbs up. Mr. Trump, he said, would be "good for Syria."
The first significant step of the new administration comes while Trump is not even in offices. Obama, selfishly concerned with his historic legacy, suddenly makes a 180 degree turn and starts to implement Trump polices. Lets consider the initial position:
Asked about Aleppo in an October debate with Clinton, Trump said it was a humanitarian disaster but the city had "basically" fallen. Clinton, he said, was talking in favor of rebels without knowing who they were.
The rebels fighting Assad in western Syria include nationalists fighting under the Free Syrian Army banner, some of them trained in a CIA-backed program, and jihadists such as the group formerly known as the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.
The Obama administration, through the CIA led by Saudi asset John Brennan, fed weapons, training and billions of dollars to "moderate rebels". These then turned around (vid) and either gave the CIA gifts to al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al Nusra) or joined it themselves.
The scheme was no secret at all and Russia as well as Syria pointed this out several times. The Russian foreign Minister Lavrov negotiated with the U.S. secretary of State Kerry who promised to separate the "moderate rebels" from al-Qaeda. But Kerry never delivered. Instead he falsely accuse Russia of committing atrocities that never happened. The CIA kept the upper hand within the Obama administration and continued its nefarious plans.
continued its nefarious plans.
likbez 11.12.16 at 3:20 am 289 Another interesting question that needs to be discussed is the "cleansing" of DNC from Clinton loyalists (the word "super delegate" smells of corruption) and thus weakening the dominant neoliberal wing of the party:
"You can't tell working people you're on their side while at the same time you're raising money from Wall Street and the billionaire class," Sanders said. "The Democratic Party has to be focused on grass-roots America and not wealthy people attending cocktail parties."
Sanders acknowledged the need for the party to continue its function as a fundraising vehicle but suggested a model akin to his presidential campaign, which raised much of its money from small-dollar donors.
… … …
Leaders of several progressive groups, who had been courting Clinton as a potential ally on many of their causes, have expressed anger in the aftermath of the election, arguing that the result was a repudiation of a campaign driven by the Democratic establishment."The Democratic establishment had their chance with this election," said Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. "It's time for new leadership of the Democratic Party - younger, more diverse and more ideological - that is hungry to do things differently, like leading a movement instead of dragging people to the polls."
… … …
Neil Sroka, a spokesman for the liberal group Democracy for America, said Ellison would be "a potentially phenomenal choice" as DNC chairman, but said the organization was open to other choices, provided they weren't part of the party establishment."I think Tuesday night was a tremendous loss that must sit at the feet of the political establishment of a Democratic Party that preordained the primary process from the very beginning," said Sroka, whose group backed Sanders in the primaries. "The folks that enabled the loss need to step back and let the grass roots lead it."
In a sign of tension at the DNC, a staff meeting there was interrupted Thursday by a staff member who stood up and blamed Trump's win on Brazile, the Huffington Post reported.
One telling comment:
PackersFanWisconsinThe Democrats abandoned Midwestern working voters and now they want us back??? Dream on! My town voted Dem for years, they used to care about us, then they want all bonkers social justice white people are all bad and sent all our jobs overseas. We will never vote Democrat again, Democrats betrayed us and they had the nerve to think we wouldn't notice!
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Nov 11, 2016 | crookedtimber.org
Suzanne 11.11.16 at 4:24 pm 284 Agreeing with everything said by LFC in#280. Certainly many people are still not in a good place after eight years of slow recovery; in this respect Clinton's defeat can also be seen as a partial rejection of her boss, since traditionally putting the heir in power has been a marker for a popular presidency.
Also, @246, don't forget that some of us where also whingeing about sexism.
@239: Clinton is a decent Democrat who ran to the left of Obama. She is not and never has been the superstar he was. The Democratic Party has a perennial issue with getting portions of their base out when it's an off-year election and also when the presidential candidate is okay but doesn't send a thrill up their leg.
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Nov 11, 2016 | angrybearblog.com
Dan Crawford | November 9, 2016 7:23 am
Journalism Politics US/Global Economics Via Bill Black at Naked Capitalism and Thomas Frank at the Guardian .
What we need to focus on now is the obvious question: what the hell went wrong? What species of cluelessness guided our Democratic leaders as they went about losing what they told us was the most important election of our lifetimes?
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Nov 10, 2016 | angrybearblog.com
There are several excerpts from the news media since Tuesday night that help drive home the point I make in that title about Trump and the Democrats in the immediate future. But the excerpts are about Clinton, not Trump:There are several excerpts from the news media since Tuesday night that help drive home the point I make in that title about Trump and the Democrats in the immediate future. But the excerpts are about Clinton, not Trump:
There are vast rural, small-town or post-industrial areas of the country where Barack Hussein Obama will have greatly outperformed Clinton
– twitter.com/AlecMacGillis of Pro Publica, Nov. 8, late evening
The left-behind places are making themselves heard, bigly
– twitter.com/AlecMacGillis of Pro Publica, Nov. 8, late evening
From Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, industrial towns once full of union voters who for decades offered their votes to Democratic presidential candidates, even in the party's lean years, shifted to Mr. Trump's Republican Party. One county in the Mahoning Valley of Ohio, Trumbull, went to Mr. Trump by a six-point margin. Four years ago, Mr. Obama won there by 22 points.
– Donald Trump Is Elected President in Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment , Matt Flegenheimer and Michael Barbaro, New York Times, yesterday
Clinton and her operatives went into the race predicting her biggest problems would be inevitability and her age, trying to succeed a two-term president of her own party. But the mood of the country surprised them. They recognized that Sanders and Trump had correctly defined the problem-addressing anger about a rigged economy and government-and that Clinton already never authentically could. Worse still, her continuing email saga and extended revelations about the Clinton Foundation connections made any anti-establishment strategy completely impossible.
So instead of answering the question of how Clinton represented change, they tried to change the question to temperament, what kind of change people wanted, what kind of America they wanted to live in. It wasn't enough.
Using Trump as a foil and a focus, she hit on a voice and an argument for why she should actually be president that perhaps only she could have, and that she'd struggled for so long to find on her own. That wasn't enough either.
Meanwhile, her staff harnessed all the money and support they could to out organize, first in the primaries and then in the general, grinding out victories while her opponents had movements.
None of it was enough, though all of it should have been, and likely would have been for another candidate. She couldn't escape being the wrong candidate for the political moment.
Interviews over the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign with members of Clinton's innermost circle, close advisers and other aides reveal a deep frustration with their failure to make a dent, a consuming sense that their candidate's persecution paranoia might actually be right, and a devastating belief that they might never persuade Americans to vote for her.
"There was no way to generate momentum," one top adviser said.
Any positive storyline from Clinton "was always fragile," admitted that adviser, and issues related to the emails inevitably stripped away any uptick in Clinton's favorable ratings.
– Inside the Loss Clinton Saw Coming: Publicly they seemed confident, but in private her team admitted her chances were 'always fragile.' , Edward-Isaac Dovere, Politico, yesterday
To several top aides, the best day of this whole campaign was a year ago, before the Sanders headache or the Trump threat really materialized, when the House of Representatives hauled Clinton and her emails in with the single aim of destroying her candidacy over Benghazi. …
She delivered tirelessly [that day], knocking back the Republicans one by one, complete with facial expressions that have launched GIFs that have been all over Democrats' Facebook and Twitter feeds ever since. She renewed her shaken team's faith that she was the leader they wanted to follow into what was already shaping up to be a dejecting primary battle.
"It reminded people of everything they like about her," said one of her senior advisers. "It's toughness, but also a calm, adult presence of someone you can actually see being president of the United States."
– Inside the Loss Clinton Saw Coming: Publicly they seemed confident, but in private her team admitted her chances were 'always fragile.'
Bill Clinton had his own problems, but never that one [his gender], and neither did Trump, who openly disparaged women throughout his campaign and still prevailed. The result was at once unfathomably difficult for the Clintons and yet not entirely surprising to Bill. He saw the signs all along the way of this campaign. He knew the people who were voting for Trump, and also the people who during the primaries were voting not for his wife but for Bernie Sanders. He saw the anger and the feelings of disconnection, but he did not know how he, or his wife's campaign, could connect to it effectively without resorting to demagoguery or false populism, something Hillary was not good at even if she was disposed to try.
– The Clintons were undone by the middle-American voters they once knew so well , David Maraniss, Washington Post, today
Last year, a prominent group of supporters asked Hillary Clinton to address a prestigious St. Patrick's Day gathering at the University of Notre Dame, an invitation that previous presidential candidates had jumped on. Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. had each addressed the group, and former President Bill Clinton was eager for his wife to attend. But Mrs. Clinton's campaign refused, explaining to the organizers that white Catholics were not the audience she needed to spend time reaching out to.
As it became clear on Tuesday night that Mrs. Clinton would lose to Donald J. Trump, supporters cast blame on everything from the news media to the F.B.I. director's dogged pursuit of Mrs. Clinton over her personal emails, and to a deep discomfort with electing a woman as president.
But as the dust settled, Democrats recognized two central problems of Mrs. Clinton's flawed candidacy: Her decades in Washington and the paid speeches she delivered to financial institutions left her unable to tap into the antiestablishment and anti-Wall Street rage. And she ceded the white working-class voters who backed Mr. Clinton in 1992.
Though she would never have won this demographic, her husband insisted that her campaign aides do more to try to cut into Mr. Trump's support with these voters. They declined, reasoning that she was better off targeting college-educated suburban voters by hitting Mr. Trump on his temperament.
Instead, they targeted the emerging electorate of young, Latino and African-American voters who catapulted Mr. Obama to victory twice, expecting, mistakenly, that this coalition would support her in nearly the same numbers. They did not.
– Hillary Clinton's Expectations, and Her Ultimate Campaign Missteps , Amy Chozick, New York Times, yesterday
And then there is this:
Clinton picked Mook, instead of promoting a campaign manager out of loyalty from her own inner circle. She persuaded Podesta, who had kept his distance in 2008 because he didn't get along with polarizing top strategist Mark Penn, to join as the guiding hand and the buffer for all the "friends of" who streamed in with advice and second-guessing.
But that didn't mean there weren't serious problems. Bill Clinton complained throughout that Mook was too focused on the ground game and not enough on driving a message-based campaign. Without a chief strategist in the mold of Penn or David Axelrod, the campaign was run by a committee of strong-willed aides struggling to assert themselves in the same space. Longtime consultant Mandy Grunwald and Palmieri grappled at points over message control as Palmieri worked her way into the inner circle. Mook and strategist Joel Benenson barely spoke to each other for the month of April, battling over their roles.
– Inside the Loss Clinton Saw Coming: Publicly they seemed confident, but in private her team admitted her chances were 'always fragile.'
And here it is, in summation of all of the above:
Whoever takes over what's left of the Democratic Party is going to have to find a way to appeal to a broader cross section of the country. It may still be true that in the long term, Republicans can't win with their demographics, but we found out Tuesday that the long term is still pretty far away. Democrats have to win more white voters. They have to do so in a way that doesn't erode the anti-racist or anti-sexist planks of the modern party, which are non-negotiable. If only there were a model for this. [Link in original. Do click it.]
The few Democratic leaders who remain are going to say that it was just a bad note struck here or there, or the lazy Bernie voters who didn't show up, or Jim Comey, or unfair media coverage of Clinton's emails, to blame for this loss. I am already seeing Democrats blaming the Electoral College, which until a few hours ago was hailed as the great protector of Democratic virtue for decades to come, and Republicans were silly for not understanding how to crack the blue "wall." They will say, just wait for Republicans to overreach. Then we'll be fine.
Don't listen to any of this. Everything is not OK. This is not OK.
– The Democratic Party Establishment Is Finished , Jim Newell, Slate, yesterday
Among all the email exchanges leaked from Podesta's hacked email account-the ones I read; I read a couple of articles quoting from each group of releases-the most revealing, in my opinion, were two sets of exchanges released about a week before the Comey outrage. Both were from early 2015, a few weeks before Clinton was scheduled, finally, to announce her candidacy in mid-April.
One shows newly hired campaign manager Robby Mook asking for John Podesta's and Huma Abedin's help in persuading Clinton to ask her husband to cancel a $225,000 speech to Morgan Stanley scheduled for a few days after her announcement and while she was scheduled to be in Iowa on her inaugural campaign trip.
The difficulty wasn't resistance from Bill; it was resistance from Hillary, at whose instance the speech had been arranged. The email exchanges indicate that Hillary could not be persuaded to all the cancellation, because it had been arranged personally by her and Tom Nides, a top aide to Clinton at the State Dept. and by then a top executive at Morgan Stanley.
Finally it was decided that Abedin would get Bill to agree to cancel the speech, and she would tell Hillary that Bill (who apparently did have qualms about the speech) was the one who decided to cancel it. Abedin reported back to Podesta and Mook that Clinton was angry about it for a couple of days but then moved on.
The other one is from about the same time and is somewhat similar. This series of exchanges was among Mook, Abedin, Podesta and Neera Tanden, and concerned Hillary's appearance in early May, shortly after her campaign announcement, at a massive Clinton Global Initiative gala in Morocco paid for by the king of Morocco, a friend of Clinton's, who all told would donate $12 million to the foundation. This, too, had been arranged by Hillary, and was not strongly supported by Bill or anyone else at the foundation.
Abedin's emails suggest (without saying outright) that she and perhaps others had tried to dissuade Clinton from arranging this, and then, once Clinton had set the date of mid-April for her campaign announcement, tried to persuade Clinton to cancel it. But by the time of this email exchange with Mook and Podesta, Abedin said it was so late and Clinton had had earlier opportunities to cancel but instead had assured her presence there, that it will break a lot of glass" (or some such phrase) for Clinton to cancel. Mook did manage to get Clinton's agreement to have Bill attend instead of her.
These instances illustrate what was a constant throughout: Mook and two or three others, including Podesta, having to put on a full court press to stop Clinton from acting as though she weren't a candidate for president. Or a candidate for anything. Both Podesta and Tanden complained about Clinton's "instincts," a euphemism for "I'm completely unaware of the overarching mood of the public in this election cycle. Or, I don't give a damn about the overarching mood of the public in this election cycle. And I certainly don't give a damn about down-ballot Dems. Or about Dems. Or about anything other than what I want to do."
Clinton arranged to clear the Democratic field of anyone thought in early 2015 to have chance against her in the primaries. She just wasn't willing to swear off anything else she wanted, besides the presidency, in order to reduce the chance that she would lose the general election.
This wasn't Lent, after all. And anyway, Clinton isn't Catholic.
Had Mook not killed that $225,000 speech to Morgan Stanley by Bill Clinton in April 2015, Bernie Sanders-whom Clinton could not clear the field of until June 6, 2016-would have won the nomination and would be president-elect now, accompanied by a newly elected Senate, and maybe House, Democratic majority. That fee would have been identified in the Clintons' tax returns, filed presumably in last April and (presumably) released shortly afterward.
In early 2015, when Hillary was arranging for Bill to give that speech-undoubtedly arrangements made shortly after Elizabeth Warren removed any doubt that she would run-Clinton looked to be free of any challenge from the left. So it didn't bother her one whit that this would be revealed during the primary season.
Nor, since she expected her general election opponent to be Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, did it concern her that this would be known during the general election campaign. It wasn't as if Bush wasn't a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street. Or Rubio owned by other highly unpretty financial interests.
And even if it did, well, it was worth the risk. After all, after the general election, the gravy train for both her and her husband would stop. And it wasn't blue collar workers in the Rust Belt who were her target votes, so it wasn't all that big a risk anyway.
So we were saddled with a Democratic presidential nominee whose decades in Washington and the paid speeches she delivered to financial institutions left her unable to tap into the antiestablishment and anti-Wall Street rage. Someone who had to cede the white working-class voters who backed Barack Obama in 2008 and again in 2012, because the only way someone who'd taken so very much money from Wall Street as personal income for doing so very little-someone who was selling her anticipated presidency to Wall Street-had no avenue with which to connect effectively with working class Rust Belters without resorting to demagoguery or false populism, something she was not good at even if she was disposed to try.
The answer then was to highlight her high status and the importance she placed on connections with celebrities and the pillars of the establishment in various venues, by campaigning hardly at all, by spending August secluded in the Hamptons, by parading with entertainment celebrities at the few rallies she had.
And by incessantly rolling out ever more names of the most elite establishment people to endorse her or at least make clear that they, too, recognized that her opponent is unfit to hold the office of the presidency. Because even though the targeted audience has access to the same information on that the elite establishment did, and were reminded by Clinton and her ad campaign of these lowlights so often that they lost their resonance, there might be a few people whose decision would turn on the opinion of these elites.
They just weren't the people the blue collar Rust Belters who, it seemed clear all along would play an outsize role in the outcome of the election. As they had in 2008 and 2012.
Nor, apparently, did she have any avenue to point out whom Trump's financial campaign backers actually were, who was writing his budget and regulatory proposals, who was selecting his court and agency-head nominees, his SEC, FTC and NLRB member nominees, and why. They're not people with labor union backing, nor do they have the interests of blue collar folks at heart. Their interests are diametrically opposite those of blue collar workers. And Trump wasted not so much as a day in handing over to them the entire panoply of powers of the federal government.
But having sold her avenue for informing people of this, to Wall Street and any other huge-money interest waiving a mega-check around in exchange for a 45-minute-long speech by or question-and-answer session with, the likely president she was limited to reminding voters of what they themselves saw, and assuring them that elites viewed him just as they did. Which may be why her campaign manager, Mook, wasn't as focused on messaging as Bill Clinton wished. Normally, a candidate has one. This candidate had foreclosed to herself the message she needed to have, and had nothing much filling in for it. That wasn't Mook's fault.
Trump wasn't going to co-opt Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell were going to co-opt Trump. All the indications were that that is what would happen. And that, Trump has made unabashedly clear now, is what will happen. Our nominee couldn't-or at least wouldn't campaign on this anything resembling consistency.
The way to contain this is for high-profile Democrats to make clear to the public what is happening. And to threaten massive campaigns on this in none other than the Rust Belt, in the 2018 election cycle. And to start very, very soon. People who supported Obama in 2008 and 2012 aren't Donald Trump's base. Most of them would have flocked to Sanders or to Elizabeth Warren in this election.
The latter should be shoved in anyone's face who starts blathering about sexism hurting Clinton among the hoi polloi . The former should answer the question about whether racism was part of the appeal to the voters who put Trump over the top, by one per cent, in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and came within barely more than a point of doing son in New Hampshire and, of all states, Minnesota. All states went comfortably for Obama, and all except Pennsylvania went for Sanders in the primary, as did Indiana. And had Warren instead of Sanders been Clinton's primary challenger, she like Sanders would have voted for her.
People who claim otherwise on either point don't know the region. It is not the South and it is not the Southwest. Trump's racism and xenophobia did not win those states for Trump. Nor did Clinton's gender.
The first step is to appoint a strong Sanders backer in charge of the DNC. Jeff Weaver, maybe. Or Jim Dean. No war for the soul of the party. That ship sailed on Tuesday.
Recognize that.
And join me in wishing Hillary and Bill Clinton a happy jaunt in their retirement as they luxuriate in the massive wealth that, while possibly still not quite enough to sate them, we are about to pay very dearly for.
Links to be added later today.
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LYLEJAMES Mckim , 10 Nov 2016 16:5>Nov 11, 2016 | www.theguardian.com
People have lost their sense of security, status and even identity. This result is the scream of an America desperate for radical changeThey will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry.
But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism. That worldview – fully embodied by Hillary Clinton and her machine – is no match for Trump-style extremism. The decision to run one against the other is what sealed our fate. If we learn nothing else, can we please learn from that mistake?
Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.
At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness.
For the people who saw security and status as their birthright – and that means white men most of all – these losses are unbearable.
Donald Trump speaks directly to that pain. The Brexit campaign spoke to that pain. So do all of the rising far-right parties in Europe. They answer it with nostalgic nationalism and anger at remote economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American free trade agreement the World Trade Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women. Elite neoliberalism has nothing to offer that pain, because neoliberalism unleashed the Davos class. People such as Hillary and Bill Clinton are the toast of the Davos party. In truth, they threw the party.
Trump's message was: "All is hell." Clinton answered: "All is well." But it's not well – far from it.
Neo-fascist responses to rampant insecurity and inequality are not going to go away. But what we know from the 1930s is that what it takes to do battle with fascism is a real left. A good chunk of Trump's support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed resources and opportunities to communities of colour, and insist that polluters should pay for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future.
It could fashion policies that fight institutionalised racism, economic inequality and climate change at the same time. It could take on bad trade deals and police violence, and honour indigenous people as the original protectors of the land, water and air.
People have a right to be angry, and a powerful, intersectional left agenda can direct that anger where it belongs, while fighting for holistic solutions that will bring a frayed society together.
Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner of a people's agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.
Bernie Sanders' amazing campaign went a long way towards building this sort of coalition, and demonstrated that the appetite for democratic socialism is out there. But early on, there was a failure in the campaign to connect with older black and Latino voters who are the demographic most abused by our current economic model. That failure prevented the campaign from reaching its full potential. Those mistakes can be corrected and a bold, transformative coalition is there to be built on.
That is the task ahead. The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned. From Elizabeth Warren to Nina Turner, to the Occupy alumni who took the Bernie campaign supernova, there is a stronger field of coalition-inspiring progressive leaders out there than at any point in my lifetime. We are "leaderful", as many in the Movement for Black Lives say.
So let's get out of shock as fast as we can and build the kind of radical movement that has a genuine answer to the hate and fear represented by the Trumps of this world. Let's set aside whatever is keeping us apart and start right now.
xpxpxp , 11 Nov 2016 14:5>ngonyama , 11 Nov 2016 12:5>Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously.
You forgot to mention identity politics. Neoliberalism and identity politics go hand in hand. I don't think it's a surprise that after the 50's and the Second Red Scare, HUAC, McCarthyism and the John Birch Society the socialist, communist and other left-wingers were gone from the US and identity politics became ascendant.
We don't see SJW being dragged in front of Congress and them losing their jobs, nor do we see the National Guard coming in to break up Slut Walks. Instead, we see them in the highest positions of power and with governments and corporations embracing their ideas. The reason is simple; identity politics and SJWs are no threat to people in power.
Keep people divided into ever smaller identities and they can't fight back. Keep demonizing people for objecting, calling them sexist and racist for speaking up, and you muzzle the opposition. If someone wants to take on neoliberalism then they need to abandon identity politics.
Glass-Steagal was repealed, Wall St. stole itself rich, people wanted change (Yes we can!). But not a single bankster megathief was even investigated and in the rust belt and elsewhere millions suffered. They were told that they needed to shut up because they were evil privileged white males who needed to be HRC's blue wall because she owned them. Refusal to comply meant they were racist misogynists.Mark Linley , 11 Nov 2016 12:3>So now they are racist misogynists and proud of it.
And why all this? Because Hillary's ego is so large that it bumps into the edges of the universe. She calls that her class ceiling.
Thanks Hillary. You brought us Trump. You and that bunch of privileged DNC-ers that are in bed with Wall Street.
The left's reflections are getting closer, but we're still not quite there it seems.Quistal , 11 Nov 2016 11:5>... ... ...
The visible, real-life consequences of globalisation and modern capitalism are those targets picked out (hardly by coincidence) by Trump and Farage. The most obvious sign of globalisation is not a billionaire's yacht, but that when you call to sort out being overcharged or crappy service, you finally get through to an outsourced offshored call centre. And when the right attacks them and the left inevitably and correctly defends them - that immigrants do contribute to the economy, but are still disadvantaged economically, that women are paid less for the same work, that muslims face discrimination every day - we're infact subliminally reinforcing Trump/Farage's blunter message: that the left's priority constituents are immigrants, people of colour, muslims and women.
And then we criticise a 50 year old white unemployed or zero-hour-contract man for being "selfish" and "stupid" when he votes for the only candidate who *appears* to put him first, when we seem to ask him to put everyone else first.
The left is losing the argument because our answers to modern problems are removed from everyday experience. Correct, but complex. Trump and Farage understand KISS. If we think the solution is to just keep saying the same thing louder, like an English tourist abroad, we'll carry on losing.
"It was the Democrats' embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump"wariquari MarkAWilliams , 11 Nov 2016 10:5>Yes indeed, I have seen this coming since the mid nineties, when the -fairly high tech- Company, where I worked for at the time, became a victim of globalization, 120 people got fired, a.o. me.
Gladly I was able to still find a job at 50, a hell of a lot of others did not.
Besides, I have been active in International business since the early 1960's until recently, so I know what I am talking about.
We are spoiling 200 years of social economic improvement to the short term interests of capital at supersonic speed. (modern communication and transport, the free movement of capital)
Both the republicans and the democrats made that happen (as their followers did in Europe)
The Globalizing, Outsourcing, Monetary, Laissez-Faire, Supply side economy.
That is the one thing that I was in agreement with, with Trump, for the rest, by the way he is talking now, it looks very much as if we will be having to deal with a liar. (and a cheat?)
After all he did say a lot of different things while selling himself in the campaign from the image that he seems to depict now..
The worst things are in my opinion his wish to destroy the livelyhood of lots of people world wide by not accepting the human influences on the climate, this besides lots of others things is in my opinion extremely selfish, especially seen the fact that a green economy can be -at least- as profitable (in work and money) as the fossil one was.
And of course the repeal of Obamacare, one of the few successes that Obama could materialize in his mainly obstructed time in office.
Jim987 , 11 Nov 2016 08:4>What is 'Neoliberalism'
Neoliberalism is a policy model of social studies and economics that transfers control of economic factors to the private sector from the public sector. It takes from the basic principles of neoclassical economics, suggesting that governments must limit subsidies, make reforms to tax law in order to expand the tax base, reduce deficit spending, limit protectionism, and open markets up to trade. It also seeks to abolish fixed exchange rates, back deregulation, permit private property, and privatize businesses run by the state.Liberalism, in economics, refers to a freeing of the economy by eliminating regulations and barriers that restrict what actors can do. Neoliberal policies aim for a laissez-faire approach to economic development.
Also: Steve Keen
"It's a belief that the human social system works best if there's almost no government, and almost everything is done through markets... and also it says there should be no trade unions, no tariffs, remove all the controls and the economy will work better.
Now that's only true of a system if it is inherently stabilizing, it's like saying 'this ship will go a lot faster if you take off all the stuff that's there to stabilize it.' Yeah it will but it'll go upside down at some point and sink."
From the British perspective this is true here as well. After a number of high powered meetings over a fifteen year period, the Labour Party embraced NeoLiberalism and paid when it failed. Those meetings where pretty big and millions turned up. Those meetings took place in 19779, 983, 1987 and the final one was in 1992. The general public announced that no one would elect anyone who did not support wholesale privatisation, free markets at every turn with a special emphasis on labour market laws. Any devience, under any circumstances from Tory ideology was punished at the ballot box. Labour was forced to drop clause four as a sop to get elected.Jeff Miller , 11 Nov 2016 08:0>And when this neo liberal wet dream started to crumble in the form of crippling PFI schemes, light touch banking, zero hour agency work and possibly bigger than the light touch banking collapse, the free movement of Labour for the biggest companies in the UK. Who did the public blame for these Tory driven Liberalism? The Tories? Themselves for forcing the Labour Party to adopt these flawed policies? The Newspapers who condemned anything other than free market ideology? Nope, the blamed the very people who had been campaigning against Tory policies all along. The people who got blamed for the banking collapse was not the people who DEMANDEDbanks be deregulated, not the Party who carried out the deregulation, but the poor saps in power when it blew up.
Who gets blamed for the importing of labour? The political ideology that people had supported for thirty years? Nope, again the Party that bent over backwards to accommodate the Tesco, ASDA and sports direct et al.
And guess what? After punishing anything to the Left of Reagan or questioning free trade at the ballot box, and dismissing it as 'Socailism' it turns out they voted for a protectionist who is opposed to free trade and multi Nationals. The Party who are opposed to free trade, multinationals and 'What is good for GM is good for America'? The protector of jobs and regulated labour markets? Why the GOP of course. The Party whose DNA has all this time been at the heart of protecting jobs who shun free trade agreements and are at the very heart of the socialist movement are the Republican movement. And nobody even said anything. We all just moved into a parallel universe where the Republican movement have been campaigning against free trade for two hundred years.
"The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much - when they caused a ruckus - and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy."Lily Ng , 11 Nov 2016 07:1>- Glenn Greenwald
"Neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade..." Are you sure those are neoliberal policies? They sound exactly like conservative Republican mainstays to me. Didn't Trump run on these very things?phil100a Lily Ng , 11 Nov 2016 07:4>Exactly, they are virtually the same, with the difference being that the GOP adds "nostalgic nationalism and anger at remote economic bureaucracies – whether Washington, the North American free trade agreement the World Trade Organisation or the EU. And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women".epidavros Lily Ng , 11 Nov 2016 07:5>In difficult times, people want relief as fast as possible and they want to blame *anyone* for their plight. This is what a demagogue offers; it's why Trump is in the White House. Prepare yourselves, and never give in to Trump's cynicism.
They sound like EU policy to me. And that is because they are EU policy, all backed by EU directives.reidlou , 11 Nov 2016 07:0>Warren sold Sanders out. Sanders sold his supporters out for Debbie Wasserman Shultz, who incidentally was reelected. Hillary was forced on the ticket by the oligarchy. Change will not come from Trudeau, or Obama, or Trump, or Sanders or Warren. These people have betrayed what they said. Where do we go from here? Which is the way that's clear? Dunno, but all of the above have shown to be frauds. Whose next?bernique , 11 Nov 2016 06:2>In this election, Donald Trump was the lesser evil, so I am glad that he won. There won't be nu clear war on Iran or wherever, and better relations with Russia, China, and hopefully, the rest of the world.bernique , 11 Nov 2016 06:2>As for domestic politics, we'll take care of those issues ourselves, forcefully protesting against, if necessary. It'll be few and far between, I project.
In this election, Donald Trump was the lesser evil, so I am glad that he won. There won't be nu clear war on Iran or wherever, and better relations with Russia, China, and hopefully, the rest of the world.AnneGlenEden , 11 Nov 2016 05:1>As for domestic politics, we'll take care of those issues ourselves, forcefully protesting against, if necessary. It'll be few and far between, I project.
"...a green new deal. Such a plan could create a tidal wave of well-paying unionised jobs, bring badly needed resources and opportunities to communities ... and insist that polluters should pay for workers to be retrained and fully included in this future."AhBrightWings , 11 Nov 2016 02:4>That is, at least, the only positive suggestion that's been made. I think it's a good one the needs to be developed. I'm far from an economist but perhaps we need also to start thinking about blended economic systems rather than just one type as well.
What I don't agree with is the continuation of identity politics. It's suffering badly from overuse and also from its juxtaposition with the application of economic pain to those who are also consistently abused with every vile epithet known to man. In brief, people have been operant conditioned to either worship at its feet or loathe it with most or all of their being. It's past its use-by date and needs to grow into the real expression of its stated aims.
As an example, Merkel is quoted as saying, ""Germany and America are connected by values of democracy, freedom, and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or political views."
The words are just positive framing. We all know now that 'democracy' (defined by the UN as extreme terrorism to be fought and eliminated when iit involves public voting) refers to voting by an elite group. For the rest of it, Junckers right hand man was quoted this week as saying it's to be achieved by 'elimination of all national, cultural, ethnic, and faith identity'.
There is a unbridgable gulf between those two concepts, and the first one is simply dishonest. But journalists never explain that.
The way forward is to treat all people with dignity and respect, as long as they're not harassing or killing each other, and stop trying to brainwash them. If someone is a racist and content to keep that to themselves, leave them alone. Likewise with all the other -isms and -obias. The law and institutions need to treat people equally indeed. No negative and no positive discrimination. 'Indigenous peoples' could have a special role- but not to dispossess, sponge off, or lord it over others. Religious holidays need to be observed for all religions, not for none. I can hear the business howls now but the reality is we need to be decreasing industrial pollution and having less 'stuff', not increasing it.
I wanted Trump to win but if I saw someone(including him) harassing someone else racially, homophobically, or any other -ism or -obia, I would defend the victim to the death as long as they were in my presence. That includes male victims of domestic violence. Everything has its day and identity politics is in that category.
We need a new way and it needs to honour the reality described in the fraudelent rhetoric of the recent past globalist, multiculturalsit, and liberalist concepts. We need a completely new economic system or blend of the old which serves the needs of all the people, al the time. And we need democratic systems which empower constant feedback from those people on how far its succeeding.
Woodenarrow123 AhBrightWings , 11 Nov 2016 03:1>Agree 100% with this, but am at an utter loss to grasp why this is chalked up to the hip new lingo of "neoliberalism." Bullshit. It's as pure a distillation of conservatism as has ever been penned.Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.
This obsession with renaming things for the sake of confusion serves no one well. This is prime Trickle Down and the Conservative Manifesto through and through.
I am afraid the author is correct in describing the problem as Neo Liberalism - It is not Conservatism or Capitalism.HolyInsurgent , 11 Nov 2016 02:4>This is Neo Liberalism - You are the CEO of a plant employs 5,000 people that makes widgets. You don't know how to make a better widget but you want to increase profits so you decide to close down your plant and outsource 4,000 of the jobs to a low wage economy where workers don't have the same rights (remember China doesn't have democracy or freedom of speech).
Now your making widgets cheaper but you still aren't making enough money so you offshore the tax liability to a tax haven - There goes schools, roads, hospitals.
Now your making so much more money for the company what do you do? You give yourself a pay rise. Not any old pay rise. You pay yourself five or ten times as much.
And then you buy shares because the share price goes way up.
And then you donate to politicians and they tell the great unwashed (that's you and me) this wheeze is FREE TRADE, or conservatism or capitalism or trickle down.
It isn't its Neo Liberalism and both left and right in most of Europe and the USA has embraced it to the detriment of its citizens.
aulusmagnus , 10 Nov 2016 23:3>Naomi Klein: The Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned.
It starts by having the DNC follow its own rules. The superdelegates were dutifully counted as Hillary supporters from Day One of the primaries. Something like 507 to begin with! When Sanders won successive states, more and more superdelegates mysteriously appeared supporting Hillary. People understand what a rigged game means. This was Thumb-On-The-Scale tactics and people saw through it. The Party chose Hillary and that was that. That's not democracy. The Democratic Party needs a complete transformation from root to branch.
But yes, the bigger picture must be a focus on institutional reform. Not just for America but everywhere.
Excellent article.
I agree with Klein's take on neoliberalism, its Panglossian economic model, as a cause of much angst in the world, but the remedy is simple in the US -- regulation. Break up the big banks, end monopolies based on third-party payments, licensing and credentialing (health care, the universities, etc.), and levy higher taxes on the wealthy. I truly believe that race relations among Americans have never been better, and that most "problems" have largely been manufactured. What America is crying out for is good, pragmatic government.Debra Smith , 10 Nov 2016 22:5>Naomi is spot on. She is speaking a truth that too many have no wish to hear because it tampers with their idealize status quo. They have theirs and to hell with everyone else. That time has past and the groaning of the privileged- people who do not CARE (which does not include many people with means- that is stupid to relegate the carers to hell with the criminals) is so LOUD right now. They are spinning bank reports and market doom and gloom.colddebtmountain , 10 Nov 2016 22:0>It has been said that HALF of the USA is a 'basket of deplorables' - WOW that is reductionist logic and it explains nothing.
I am not American and yet, what I know is that PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE- human beings- so please- what a bullshit argument- that you have tried all too often with Brexit (its not working for you so who is the insane one? Wasn't it Einstein who said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result?
RESEARCH says that people are usually very informed about the issues of their own lives. All they have left is their lives and the lives of their children. A LITTLE respect would be nice.
Many creatures can only see things that are moving. Maybe some people are like that once they trust. WE ALL trusted government, police, agencies because we wanted to believe in a common good. That trust was ABUSED. The last grasping woke people up. They saw that grab very clearly.
And this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCWNqMV4Bgs (I was married to a cop at that time and the interviewee is one of the most staid journalists in Canada with a program on public television.
Someone has to OWN those facts before casting aspersions on mankind. The voters are not stupid ESPECIALLY when it comes to SURVIVAL and it is brink time.You expect them to DIE QUIETLY? Dream on in your precious nightmare.
Debra Smith , 10 Nov 2016 22:5>People have a right to be angry
And people have been saying that for decades but no one has been listening, least of all the trendy neoliberals who thought they had found the final economic solution.
You cannot strip away a person's identity, life and loves, without them losing their dignity -totally. You must prepare and assist every one of them for change over realistic time scales dealing with every consequence as it happened. None of that was done because all of what has happened is the product of opportunism - cash today think about it tomorrow.
These trendy neoliberals have cheated us all, not once, not twice, but all the time, and they show no guild, no guilt at all. They will continue to pay the price until they listen to us and change.
Naomi is spot on. She is speaking a truth that too many have no wish to hear because it tampers with their idealize status quo. They have theirs and to hell with everyone else. That time has past and the groaning of the privileged- people who do not CARE (which does not include many people with means- that is stupid to relegate the carers to hell with the criminals) is so LOUD right now. They are spinning bank reports and market doom and gloom.Azul66 , 10 Nov 2016 21:0>It has been said that HALF of the USA is a 'basket of deplorables' - WOW that is reductionist logic and it explains nothing.
I am not American and yet, what I know is that PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE- human beings- so please- what a bullshit argument- that you have tried all too often with Brexit (its not working for you so who is the insane one? Wasn't it Einstein who said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result?
RESEARCH says that people are usually very informed about the issues of their own lives. All they have left is their lives and the lives of their children. A LITTLE respect would be nice.
Many creatures can only see things that are moving. Maybe some people are like that once they trust. WE ALL trusted government, police, agencies because we wanted to believe in a common good. That trust was ABUSED. The last grasping woke people up. They saw that grab very clearly.
And this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCWNqMV4Bgs (I was married to a cop at that time and the interviewee is one of the most staid journalists in Canada with a program on public television.
Someone has to OWN those facts before casting aspersions on mankind. The voters are not stupid ESPECIALLY when it comes to SURVIVAL and it is brink time.You expect them to DIE QUIETLY? Dream on in your precious nightmare.
Perfect. Thank you, Naomi, for the best column on the 2016 election. Democrats are proving to be sore losers but they can come around if they all or most read your take on the outcome of our presidential election. Neoliberal has been our downfall but still most Americans are not aware of even the word. Times to get explanation of the ideology and the negative effect on the world. It has been so cruel and so horrible since Jimmy Carter who started this whole thing but the Clintons were the cruelest of all. I am so glad Hillary did not win. I could not vote for Trump so voted for Jill Stein.ViewFromTheUSA , 10 Nov 2016 19:5>It was also their (and the left in general's) embrace of identity politics. Welcoming the whiny 'social justice warrior' attitude that puts everyone into little groups and puts those groups into little lanes, and no one can ever leave their group or lane. Calling people racist or bigoted, not for actual racism or bigotry, but for merely expressing a different opinion. White privilege- trying to shut down the opinions of white people. Cultural appropriation- witch-hunting people for wearing a certain hairstyle or costume. Safe spaces- creating echo chambers and segregating people from even hearing opposing opinions or ideas. Microagressions- claiming offense over perceived slights and insults in harmless remarks. not to mention trying to police, ban, and control speech.RobMorganAU Hubert Hammack , 10 Nov 2016 20:5>I'm a liberal, I lean left, my ideals and values and principles and what I stand for are more in line with left-wing ideology, but if they want to be taken seriously and have a chance at winning again, the left needs to let identity politics die.
Yeah, you need to slow down a bit there, Hubert.American_Sniper , 10 Nov 2016 19:4>Neoliberalism.
An ideology that believes that if you give rich people absolutely unfettered ability to make even more money, they'll magically look after everyone else.
Davosland where Bill Clinton gets to hang out with Rupert Murdoch.Dominique2 , 10 Nov 2016 19:3>Not only the Democrats.AnnHodson , 10 Nov 2016 19:1>The center left's shameful, braindead acceptance of Thatcher-Reaga, Dumbonomics has been a worldwide plague.
The EU, supposedly a bulwark of common sense, is still officially austerian and neoliberal, even though some hard thinking is going on.
Anger-fuelled adoption of far right policies and economics is a further lurch in the same direction: deregulation, unchecked corporate power, quashing of workers' rights.
A bad time for the disenfranchised all over the world, now being used as electoral cannon fodder by their owners.
As an English woman who lived in America for some years, it was perfectly clear to me that voters there have a choice between cuddly-right and hard-right.ilwudumass , 10 Nov 2016 18:4>There is no "left" in America, and there is none in the UK either in any meaningful, workable sense. All we have is the soft-right and an unreconstructed 70s Trot. Brilliant.
Nice as it might seem, " The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions" sounds like yet another loose coalition of pressure groups with no cohesive platform or plan. Same old, same old.
Absolutely spot on. I remember, as a rare liberal working at a GOP-run Enron, how disheartened I was watching Bill Clinton pander to the GOP elites and shove NAFTA through a GOP-run Congress while the majority of Democrats voted against it. He also sought, for political expediency, many neoliberal solutions that doomed the working class to subsistence. The GOP crowed that Reagan won the Cold War when actually it was the shift of wealth from the West to the 3rd world as a bribe that ultimately brought us to the globalized mess we find ourselves in. This was during Clinton's presidency. Unfortunately Obama did a u-turn and continued GW's disastrous tenure in what really matters: wars, globalization, abandonment of the working class. Why didn't the Democratic elite not remind voters that the GOP was behind globalization and the shift of wealth from the middle class to overseas?JohnBinxBolling , 10 Nov 2016 18:3>A Message from the Rust Belt: It's the NAFTA, StupidTzctguar JohnBinxBolling , 10 Nov 2016 21:5>The road to President Trump began with the enactment of NAFTA, a heinous betrayal by the Democratic Party of its blue collar base and of it's most basic principles, taking it from the party of the New Deal to the party of the Brave New Global World Order Deal, screwing it's most loyal constituents in favor of Wall Street.
The next step on the road to the Trump House was the Clinton's reckless deregulation, culminating in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, yet again in the name of a bigger, more profitable, more powerful Wall Street at the peril of Main Street.
But perhaps the most decisive factor in sending blue collar rust belt America into the arms of an orange-haired demon is what happened when they put their faith, heart and souls into electing Barack Obama, a man who ran as a progressive, promising hope and change, but who then immediately governed as a neo-lib.
I know what some of you are saying right now, that given the fierce opposition he was up against, he accomplished what he could; but that's a bunch of bull, as we say in the Midwest.
No one forced him to appoint, immediately upon taking office, Wall Street insiders to his cabinet and make Larry Summers (the architect of deregulation, neo-lib style) his chief economic adviser.
No one forced him to appoint corporate toady, Common Core loving, privatization loving (through charter schools) Arne "teach to the test" Duncan to Secretary of Education.
No one forced him to immediately abandon, in the fight for Obamacare, the public option.
No one forced him to ultimately come up with a health care plan, that at its base, is of by and big Pharma and the insurance industry, one that lowers costs not by controlling them but by rationing care (that's what those huge deductibles and co-pays are for and they're working--working Americans, even while insured, don't dare visit the doctor, except when at death's door, for fear the doctor will order tests they can't afford to pay.)
Most now use their insurance as catastrophic policies to be used only in emergencies. This is why Obamacare is so hated in America--not because it's socialist, but because it isn't. (Remember, they voted for hope and change)
No Republican cabal forced Obama to embrace TPP, NAFTA on steroids and so univerally hated here in the heartland.
Ah, but you say, Hillary has come out against it. But only after praising it and only in cagey language, about not approving it in its present form (and she has yet to comment on the viscerally hated NAFTA forever linked to the Clintons and the Democrats).
Much is made (and rightly so) of Trump's threats to constitutionality and the rule of law. Yet Democrats seem blissfully unaware of their own full-frontal assaults on the Constitution.
For elected officials who have taken an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, supporting NAFTA and TPP, which sign over US sovereignty to unelected, unaccountable (corporate controlled) international tribunals, giving them the power to, in essence, overturn any US, state or federal, is nothing less than an act of treason. You might as well just take the Constitution, rip it to shreds, and throw it up in the air like confetti.
(It's so easy to see Trump's threats to the Constitution, so difficult for Democratic elites to see their own obliteration of it.)
Why is the hatred of NAFTA, of TPP (and of the Clintons) so visceral in rust-belt America?
I know people who watched the plants they worked in dismantled piece by piece and shipped off to Mexico. I've spoken to people who've had the humiliating experience of going to Mexico to train their replacements. I've talked to union members who've reported that employers, at the bargaining table, have demanded huge cuts in pay and benefits, saying that unless they concede, they're moving to Mexico.
It's personal.
It's not like blue collar, rust-belt America hasn't given the Democrats chance after chance. They've been voting Democratic since 1992.
They gave Obama two chances, believing his promises of hope and change, only to witness his championing of TPP.
Time and again, the Clintonian Democrats have deceived and betrayed their blue collar, rust-belt base. Time and again rust-belt blue collar America has supported them, nonetheless, hoping, like Charlie Brown, that this time they wouldn't have the football pulled away.
But the accumulating decay, the devastation of the great recession (and the feeble, corporate oriented Democratic response) have left them with no hope left. The vote for Donald is a howl of rage and desperation. He was the only way left for them to vent their rage (after the Democratic elites dispensed with Bernie Sanders).
The next four years are going to be hell. But for heartland rust-belt America, the last thirty-five years have been hell (and they have nothing left to lose).
Welcome to their world.
Some USians , trumpeters mostly, are very funny.Emma Rosenthal , 10 Nov 2016 18:1>On the one hand you don't want immigrants in your mist because they undercut local workers.
And in the other hand you don't want those same people to get good jobs in their own country, because they undercut your own workers.
You think you have a God given right to jobs for which you aren't productive enough.
In other words you don't want to compete.
You want to sell us your stuff allright ( NAFTA slaughtered the Mexican farming sector, specially subsistence farming) but you would rather don't buy Mexican stuff, unless it is raw materials so you can add value and sell it back to us.
NAFTA has made countless articles cheaper to all of you, and has slowed down illegal immigration which has been in the decline for a while.
But you want it all, no matter how unrealistic.
Having you cake and eat it. While riding an unicorn please.
Why Klein doesn't mention Jews in her list of targets of this right wing hate and reaction is surprising. In defining the reason neo-liberalism failed so many people, she states "At the same time, they have witnessed the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. Success is a party to which they were not invited, and they know in their hearts that this rising wealth and power is somehow directly connected to their growing debts and powerlessness." And this paragraph directly applies to how the Trumpettes, the KKK, who endorsed him, the Alt-right who he played a major role of normalizing, sees JEWS. Central to the ideology of the extreme right is their hatred of Jews. How Klein missed that is really baffling.ID4352889 rubagreta , 10 Nov 2016 18:2>Naive comment. The "lefts" criticism of Israel is largely unrelated to the growing right's hostility to Jews. It's the latter you need to be concerned about.rubagreta ID4352889 , 10 Nov 2016 18:3>What right's hostility in the US? Where are they. There isn't a single Republican member of Congress who is hostile to Israel. David Duke ran for senate in Lousiana and got 3% of the vote.WTIngle , 10 Nov 2016 18:0>Naomi: "But this leaves out the force most responsible for creating the nightmare in which we now find ourselves wide awake: neoliberalism."bananakingdom , 10 Nov 2016 16:3>Is this completely correct, leaving out as it does something that has grown since at least the last days of WWII and throughout the Cold War, something that some call the "Deep State?"
Here's one view of it, written by a former Republican congressional staffer but in an essay found on the Bill Moyers and Company's website (Bill Moyers is definitely neither a Republican nor a conservative):
http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/ .
"Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day."
Lofgren's description is not exhaustive, not really focusing on the darkest heart within the "military industrial complex" that is intimately associated with the deep state, namely the covert, classified areas of the intelligence and security components. (I find the fact that the present president recently renewed the illegal and unconstitutional 9/11 State of Emergency Act for the eighth year in a row, just as his predecessor did every year he was in office after the Act was first signed in September, 2001, telling.)
Still, it's good starting point.
It looks to me that this huge beast is more about empire than Neoliberalism (or even NeoConservatism -- it encompasses both; it's not necessarily "left" or "right" as most use the terms, not truly Democrat or Republican).
Hillary has promised to be a president for everyone…that is, everyone who contributes to 'The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation'.ArchibaldLeach , 10 Nov 2016 16:3>
According to the Foundation's website, it is a 'non-profit 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization.'
The easiest way to make an organisation non-profit is to pay out all earnings - seven-figure director fees, first class travel, Fifth Avenue offices…oh how you can spend your way to a luxurious non-profit outcome! And whatever is left over after your personal indulgences have been satisfied, you can spend on a few pet projects.
The Clintons are seen as money grubbers who'd sell their own family members for the right price. Hillary is a despised person.Trump is no better. The only difference between him and Hillary is that he is openly corrupt. Whereas Hillary hides her corruption behind a cloak of establishment respectability.
The dumbest thing about the response to this is is how everyone is just shoehorning their own narrative into this. If this was just about neoliberalism, nobody would have voted for the Republican party. Trump won for a variety of factors. It wasn't that he was against globalisation, it's that he lied that he could change it. These people believed his "we'll bring back all the jobs" over concrete plans.MooseMcNaulty , 10 Nov 2016 16:2>Such a coalition is possible. In Canada, we have begun to cobble it together under the banner of a people's agenda called The Leap Manifesto, endorsed by more than 220 organisations from Greenpeace Canada to Black Lives Matter Toronto, and some of our largest trade unions.
I hang around in liberal circles in Toronto and even there, Black Lives Matter is hardly popular. I know socialists see the result and think that they can be next, but they won't be.
The political class assiduously serves the needs of the wealthy, while the working people fend for themselves. The banks get a bailout, the bankers get a bonus, and the consumer gets his house foreclosed on. The oil companies and hedge funds get loopholes built into the tax code, and the middle class hears that they might not be able to draw their Social Security until they're seventy. It's not hard to see why people are unhappy, and Trump was unafraid to call the system rigged and the players corrupt. You can analyze the results of this election until you're blue in the face, but I think what it ultimately comes down to is that the working people have been thrown under the bus in favor of corporate profit for far too long.Bar4U MooseMcNaulty , 10 Nov 2016 16:3>True enough, but Trump's "solutions" will just make it worse for the same group of people and continue to support corporations and the wealthy. Sadly yet again the voters have been duped.MooseMcNaulty Bar4U , 10 Nov 2016 17:1>Probably. The only hope I have is that Trump is a vanity candidate, so I expect he really will try to do the best job he can for as many people as he can. He genuinely has no love for the political class and our campaign finance or lobbying systems. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that something half decent might yet come of his election. Probably not any of the big issues, and it's a shame about the environment and the Supreme Court, but you never know... Or so I'll keep telling myself.Alarcos , 10 Nov 2016 16:1>The problem with this stroy is two-fold:formerlefty Alarcos , 10 Nov 2016 16:2>1] Since the Eighties the powerless left have been saying that the solutions are on the left ... while the voters kept moving right. Repeating the same thing but louder doesn't make it work any better.
2] Since the Eighties every faction of the left has been calling unto the other flavours of left to 'unite' ... whereas as what they usually meant was 'join us'. Even now I see no evidence that the left is capable of running a 'united-self' ... let alone capable of uniting and healing the deep rift in the society of Trumpian-US or Brexit-UK.This ship has sailed! The Modern Left has failed to prevent this fascist take-over every bit as much as 'Old Left' failed to stand-up in the Europe of the 1930's and 'Older Left' failed to withstand the nationalist fervor of '14-'18. No, I am afraid that, as in all previous episode, this fascism must be fought. We better start preparing while we still can.
But the problem with your story is that the left were defeated some time back. What we've had since are liberals (i.e. the neo-liberal right) tacking ever-rightward, constantly insisting that's the only way to avert the hard populist right. The result has been complete failure, as all that right-ward movement by liberals has achieved is to further create the conditions that lead to the rise of the right.Europa77 Alarcos , 10 Nov 2016 16:3>Its pretty much the same thing that happened in Russia post-communism. Neo-liberalism/liberalism (they are, in fact, the same thing) led to the rise of watered-down kind of fascism.
The modern pro-capitalist/non-populist right has failed to prevent this fascist take-over every bit as much as 'Old Right' failed to stand-up in the Europe of the 1930's...
DunedainRanger , 10 Nov 2016 16:1>as much as 'Old Left' failed to stand-up in the Europe of the 1930's
The 'old left' did stand up in the 1930s. The prison camps of mainland Europe were full of 'lefties' who stood up.
This article is spot on. Neoliberalism creates its own hierarchy which has no place for the peole who voted for Trump. Two quotes from US voters (with acknowledgements to Sky News).fmajor7 , 10 Nov 2016 16:1>
1. A black man who voted for Trump...'most blacks have more in common with white woeking class families trying to make ends meet than they do with the democrats'
2. A well heeled white democrat man in shock....'trying to come to terms with an election which has shown me a side of America I was unaware of...'
Shock horror....Trump was elected by ordinary people.It was interesting to see that nearly each and every newspaper in the US and the UK and everywhere else and nearly all the TV channels started a barrage of anti-Trump rhetoric always repeating his sexual escapades and his racist and sexist comments. Only a few alternative blogs or news channels dared to criticise Hillary or question her integrity.bananakingdom , 10 Nov 2016 16:0>
Now that Trump has won has shocked all these news channels and everybody is asking who voted for him ? All those "deplorable" people as mentioned by Hillary or all those sexist, racist or uneducated whites ? Were they angry ? If so, why ? Was it a protest vote ? Why ?
It is interesting to read Charles Hugh Smith's writing "The source of our rage" below and wonder why all these "expert" commentators got it wrong --
https://goo.gl/VuEGZyTurn on your television or pick up a paper. Listen to a radio or read the online news. There's always someone telling us how we should think, and what we should do.Andrew Failes bananakingdom , 10 Nov 2016 16:1>
The belief that they know better - that they are superior to the rest of us - permeates every corner of our lives. Those that disagree with and challenge the 'consensus' are considered ignorant or uneducated.This is the argument that's been trotted out since Brexit. The poor old folks didn't know what they were doing. That somehow, those who grew up under the black cloud shadowing post-Second World War Britain couldn't comprehend the implications of seeking to regain control of their economy and borders.
That's the way society has gone - the megaphone minority blasting away in our ear. The elites who believe their values and opinions are the only ones that matter. Pity the poor taxpayer who picks up the tab.
The international 'specialist' who flies in for a couple of days to lecture us on what they think we're doing wrong. From how farmers should manage their land, the type of energy we should use, through to how to control our borders. How these self-appointed experts love to enlighten the great unwashed. It happens at the local level as well. It could be the council dictating something as simple as the colour a homeowner is allowed to paint their fence.
There's the local action group. After moving into an area and setting themselves up as they see fit, they seek to restrict who can join them, and what their fellow residents can do.
A paddock that once held a herd of sheep has been subdivided, and then subdivided again. Yet the new owner places a placard on their new fence protesting against any future developments.The events of yesterday in the US have turned the world on its head. World leaders are struggling to know how to respond, to Trump's victory.
While so much of the commentary and analysis by the experts has been about the two personalities involved, the US election results reflect something much more basic than that.It's that the ones who do the lifting - that is, those who set their alarms early and go off to work - are tired of subsidising those that are the recipients of the public purse. They've had enough of paying for the lifestyles of those who look down on them. This includes the political class who lecture them, and everyone else.
The commentariat are putting their spin on the US election result. Much like Brexit, they're arguing that the poor uneducated folks didn't know what they were doing. The result is a two-fingered salute to the political elite who sign off on trade agreements with little regard for those that will lose their jobs. It's a protest against those elected to represent the voters' interests but rarely, if ever, visit the factory floor.
But it's not only the political class who left the majority behind. The result also reflects the great chasm that continues to grow between the wealthy elite - Wall Street - and those on the other side where wages have gone nowhere for years.
The post-GFC world has only pumped more money into the top few percent, while everybody else has been left a long way behind. While the Dow Jones Industrial Index has increased more than two-and-a-half times since the lows of 2009, real wages have barely increased a dime.
Nobody knows how the Trump presidency will play out. I doubt he even knows himself. And as the elites predict, it might turn out to be one of the US' great follies.
Some are calling the result a swing back to conservatism. But the result illustrates ever so strongly how the so-called 'silent majority' are deciding to reclaim the way their lives are governed. It's a major blow to elitism, and is a trend that will only grow.Matt Hibbard,
For The Daily ReckoningYeah because putting one of the elite in power a 'a major blow to elitism'. Maybe you actually should listen to an expertoutkast1213 , 10 Nov 2016 16:0>Perhaps if The Guardian and every other major left media site would have been understanding this the past few years instead of ignoring Bernie, plugging for Clinton, and pushing the SJW stuff there wouldn't have been a Trump presidency. Everyone shares a bit of blame for his win. Hopefully we can not get so obsessed with blind Dem support and identity politics going forward.Bogdanich , 10 Nov 2016 15:5>Ya think? Finally someone says something sensible. Neo-liberal economic policy and neo-con foreign policy I might add. There is a German blogger who is a polyglot. He speaks German, French, Italian, English and Russian. He reads the romance languages at least I don't know about Russian. He monitors how different news events are spun to the various populations. Which facts are presented, which omitted, obfuscations, lies and who's controlling the narrative. Because of the time difference he went to bed before the election results were known and woke up after. The opening sentence on his piece that morning was, "So I just woke up and found that the world has changed. World War III was called off."AmyInNH Bogdanich , 10 Nov 2016 16:4>Which in my estimation is accurate. Perhaps not WWIII but certainly another major war. And what's the result over here in America? It's the Hillary supporters who are behaving violently. Rioting, destroying property, assaults, interfering with transportation etc. Not covered in your press of course because it is the republicans who were supposed to be the violent monsters and it doesn't fit the narrative.
First, neo-con warring, an essential subcomponent of neoliberalism, for when CIA manipulation of political strife isn't possible. Indonesia versus Iraq, for example.Peter Wynn , 10 Nov 2016 15:5>
Second, Hillary supporters rebelling is in the news this morning, though they aren't a) airing it as an alarming event, nor b) having the same paramilitary police response to it.
Third, R has been pushing for warring and I've no idea where you'd (they'd?) come up with an all R Washington isn't going to jump right in. Particularly, post election, when congress refuels the "campaign donation" money laundering machine, defense contractors (Northrop, etc.) and infrastructure (Parsons Brinckerhoff, etc.), with the gifting of federal contracts, which will no doubt run way over budget as cost plus contracts.Many of those left seemingly disenfranchised by neo-liberalism are taking up scapegoating, rather than blaming the REAL cause of their problems.AmyInNH Peter Wynn , 10 Nov 2016 16:5>There's a whole lot of less than Whole Truth used to manipulate. Some intentional, some due to ignorance.Dean Myerson , 10 Nov 2016 15:5>
Long ago I asked, what is the difference between ignorance and arrogance, and about the only thing I can come up with is ignorance is unintentional while arrogance is confident ignorance.And people like Trump never went to Davos? Republicans don't do that? Yes, a lot of people are in economic pain, and the Democrats and Clinton share that blame. I agree that the Democratic party needs to be either decisively wrested from pro-corporate neoliberals, or it needs to be abandoned, but Trump's victory is not just about economic pain. It's also about fear of the diverse country we are becoming. You want to know who is to blame for the election of Donald Trump? The people who voted for him. They are the ones who fell for the con that he was their solution.mcstowy Dean Myerson , 10 Nov 2016 16:0>What you say is correct, but the point is that it is expected that the GOP will protect business interests and profit at the expense of people. That is why they exist. The Democrats have historically been the party that protects the working class. As the author points out, they have abandoned that role during the last 40 years, leaving the working class without protection from the concentration of corporate wealth, power and influence. Working class whites, Latinos and blacks should be allies, not competitors for the scraps left after the Davos party. The conservative right in America is successful because they have successfully pitted these natural allies against each other, but they have been aided the the embrace of corporate neoliberalism by the Democratic party leadership.PierreCorneille , 10 Nov 2016 15:3>Bill Clinton gave us Bush the Younger thanks to having the self control of an adolescent chimpanzee. Now the Democrat establishment aided by another Clinton gave us Trump. When are we going to stop buying into the neo-liberal bullshit. They have played us like suckers since the revolution the French won for us. Speaking of the French, their revolution scared the shit out of the "founding fathers" especially the parts about equality and fraternity. I saw Trump coming a long time ago, but I thought someone would stand up. It wasn't as if we weren't warned. Instead all the talking fucking heads are telling us it's time to heal to work together. Right, like the way the Republicans worked with Obama. Are we going to work together, are we going to fight? Nah. We"ll find someone new to bomb in the name of liberty and some new shinny thing will come along and we'll just stay bent over. But never forget, we are the greatest and the most exceptional.evacarey PierreCorneille , 10 Nov 2016 15:5>Good post. But it was also Obama who recently led us here. He didn't do anything. Sure he was stymied by the Republican congress. But he didn't even use the bully pulpit.NoOneYouKnowNow , 10 Nov 2016 15:3>
He seemed to me to want to work for the rest of the world more than he did the U.S. He couldn't even see that the trade agreements are a problem for our citizens. And I supported him more than any previous presidential candidate, because I thought he cared.Ironic that Ms Klein has published this in the Clintonista, neocon Guardian. Perhaps we can revive the media as well.nonsensefactory JulesBywaterLees , 10 Nov 2016 16:4>Generally speaking, American and British media supports neoconservative foreign policy (regime change in Libya and Syria, military confrontation with Russia and China, expanded funding for NATO, the Iraq War WMD lies, etc.). At the same time, it tends to support neoliberal trade policies (free flow of capital, offshoring manufacturing to sweatshop zones) that enrich billionaires while impoverishing the middle class.nonsensefactory , 10 Nov 2016 15:2>The only real difference between "conservative" and "liberal" media outlets is in their take on identity politics; this is why people view media as propaganda that tries to point people away from the more important issues of global war and wealth inequality. It's a distraction tactic.
Naomi Klein is right about the neoliberalism that played such a huge role in the creation of massive wealth inequality in the United States, but the other issue is that Hillary Clinton embraced the Bush-era neoconservative program (just look at her record as Secretary of State with Honduras, Haiti, Libya and Syria, as well as all the arms deals and support for Saudi Arabia and Israel). In addition, she was completely loyal to the Wall Street interests who crashed the economy in 2008 and yet were never criminally charged by the Obama Administration.mypets nonsensefactory , 10 Nov 2016 15:3>Obama shares much of the blame - despite coming in with Congress in Democratic hands, he quickly abandoned his populist base in favor of pro-Wall Street agendas; he expanded the domestic mass surveillance program and persecuted whistleblowers like nobody before him; and he was seduced by the CIA's regime change/drone assassination program. His peace prize is now the punchline of a joke. He didn't help out homeowners who'd been targeted by Wall Street; he instead pushed for a massive taxpayer bailout of Wall Street - and minority homeowners in particular were hit hard by the banks. As far as all the young people who supported him? He did nothing to alleviate student loan debt; that's not what Wall Street wanted. As far as renewable energy? He did little if anything on that front; instead he quietly OK'd offshore oil drilling, oil exports, and pipelines like Dakota Access. He betrayed his base and served Wall Street, and of course that's what Hillary Clinton would have done as well.
Bernie Sanders, in contrast, had good policies on all these issues and would have won the primary if it hadn't been rigged by the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and the corporate media.
The Democratic Party reforms needed are obvious:
(1) A fixed number of debates in the primary (Sanders vs. Clinton? 9 debates. Obama vs. Clinton? 26 debates).
(2) Elimination of the superdelegate system. (In Feb 2008, Clinton had 241 to Obama's 181; in Feb 2016, Clinton had 451 to Sander's 19)
(3) Opening the primaries to independent voters in places like New York, at the very least allowing last-minute party registration for independent voters.That all takes power away from Wall Street-tied party elites, who will otherwise continue to pick losers that will serve Wall Street interests in exchange for big donations - but who are unpopular with the general public. That rigged process is why Bernie Sanders, who would obviously have beaten Trump with enthusiastic millenial support, was prevented from winning the Democratic Primary.
The other party in this debacle, the corporate media - they deserve to be broken up by anti-trust legislation. TimeWarner, Disney, etc. should all be forced to break up into a hundred independently owned news outlets, otherwise it'll be an endless stream of Wall Street propaganda from them.
Sanders was far too radical and unrealistic to have carried the day. He lost fair and square.freeandfair nonsensefactory , 10 Nov 2016 15:3>" Hillary Clinton embraced the Bush-era neoconservative program (just look at her record as Secretary of State with Honduras, Haiti, Libya and Syria, as well as all the arms deals and support for Saudi Arabia and Israel). In addition, she was completely loyal to the Wall Street interests who crashed the economy in 2008 and yet were never criminally charged by the Obama Administration."Dewsburian , 10 Nov 2016 15:1>Very much so. Hillary Clinton to me was pretty indistinguishable from George Bush. I never voted for Bush and I wasn't going to vote for a female version of him.
"They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry."Kevin Parcell , 10 Nov 2016 14:5>
And in the Guardian, of course, they'll work out some way to blame Jeremy Corbyn...Wrong.Mckim Kevin ParcellWe need to ask why the polling was wrong. People who normally vote did not, and people who normally don't vote did. Clinton really did rig the election as proven by Wikileaks, and lots of Bernie supporters could not bring ourselves to vote for her ; and Clinton called Trump's redneck base "a basket of deplorables", and many of those folks who would have watched the election from a bar stool got up to kick her ass. Naturally the same persons who pretended that Clinton did not rig the election want to continue to pretend. But Naomi, she really did.
I too believe Clinton and the DNC sealed their own fate. But the "bucket of losers" accusation has proved to be false, the product of a spoof Podesta email.ronaldadair , 10 Nov 2016 17:3>
So in other words Naomi Klein admits that "rampant insecurity and inequality exist" and that something is required to be done to correct this - which I think many of us realise is a balancing of the needs of national autonomy and globalisation, but then Naomi has the audacity to attribute these "responses " to "neo fascists" So suffer on you poor under privileged unwashed. but should you rise up then we ( the enlightened) know that you are being prodded by neo fascists !! A totally ridiculous idea which can only be explained as the last desperate gasp of the politically correct whose credibility is not only on the line but is now clearly beyond the palekleptco , 10 Nov 2016 17:2>
Beautifully said. Eight years of neo-liberal acting/progressive talking Barack Obama and the prospect of more of the same from the deeply flawed Hillary Clinton was enough to hand the presidency to the grotesque Donald Trump. The Democratic party is smoldering and needs to be rebuilt as Naomi says by and for the 99%.nonsensefactory , 10 Nov 2016 15:2>http://www.snopes.com/hillary-calls-voters-bucket-of-losers /
Naomi Klein is right about the neoliberalism that played such a huge role in the creation of massive wealth inequality in the United States, but the other issue is that Hillary Clinton embraced the Bush-era neoconservative program (just look at her record as Secretary of State with Honduras, Haiti, Libya and Syria, as well as all the arms deals and support for Saudi Arabia and Israel). In addition, she was completely loyal to the Wall Street interests who crashed the economy in 2008 and yet were never criminally charged by the Obama Administration.freeandfair nonsensefactory , 10 Nov 2016 15:3>Obama shares much of the blame - despite coming in with Congress in Democratic hands, he quickly abandoned his populist base in favor of pro-Wall Street agendas; he expanded the domestic mass surveillance program and persecuted whistleblowers like nobody before him; and he was seduced by the CIA's regime change/drone assassination program. His peace prize is now the punchline of a joke. He didn't help out homeowners who'd been targeted by Wall Street; he instead pushed for a massive taxpayer bailout of Wall Street - and minority homeowners in particular were hit hard by the banks. As far as all the young people who supported him? He did nothing to alleviate student loan debt; that's not what Wall Street wanted. As far as renewable energy? He did little if anything on that front; instead he quietly OK'd offshore oil drilling, oil exports, and pipelines like Dakota Access. He betrayed his base and served Wall Street, and of course that's what Hillary Clinton would have done as well.
Bernie Sanders, in contrast, had good policies on all these issues and would have won the primary if it hadn't been rigged by the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and the corporate media.
The Democratic Party reforms needed are obvious:
(1) A fixed number of debates in the primary (Sanders vs. Clinton? 9 debates. Obama vs. Clinton? 26 debates).
(2) Elimination of the superdelegate system. (In Feb 2008, Clinton had 241 to Obama's 181; in Feb 2016, Clinton had 451 to Sander's 19)
(3) Opening the primaries to independent voters in places like New York, at the very least allowing last-minute party registration for independent voters.That all takes power away from Wall Street-tied party elites, who will otherwise continue to pick losers that will serve Wall Street interests in exchange for big donations - but who are unpopular with the general public. That rigged process is why Bernie Sanders, who would obviously have beaten Trump with enthusiastic millenial support, was prevented from winning the Democratic Primary.
The other party in this debacle, the corporate media - they deserve to be broken up by anti-trust legislation. TimeWarner, Disney, etc. should all be forced to break up into a hundred independently owned news outlets, otherwise it'll be an endless stream of Wall Street propaganda from them.
" Hillary Clinton embraced the Bush-era neoconservative program (just look at her record as Secretary of State with Honduras, Haiti, Libya and Syria, as well as all the arms deals and support for Saudi Arabia and Israel). In addition, she was completely loyal to the Wall Street interests who crashed the economy in 2008 and yet were never criminally charged by the Obama Administration."Giancarlo Bruno , 10 Nov 2016 14:5>Very much so. Hillary Clinton to me was pretty indistinguishable from George Bush. I never voted for Bush and I wasn't going to vote for a female version of him.
While I'm troubled by many of the implications of this electoral result, I think the main story is that the Democrats have bled so many votes that an extremely unpopular Republican candidate was able to win simply by holding on to most of the votes that Romney managed to get 4 years ago and flipping a few swing voters. When the final tally comes in, Hillary Clinton will likely have received over 8 million fewer votes than Obama in 2008 and nearly 5 million less than he got in 2012. Trump got fewer still, and he'll now be president because he managed to sway just enough voters in the rust belt to win several of those states.Laborequalswealth Giancarlo Bruno , 10 Nov 2016 15:5>It could not be clearer that Sanders' approach would have been the better one for this election by far. He spoke to the anger at the economic hollowing out of so much of this country while offering prescriptions that were in the best interests of the vast majority of people and framed the discussion in a way that made it clear race was not at the center, that the unchecked pursuit of the class interests of the wealthy & well-connected was responsible for so much of the human devastation that can easily be observed in so many parts of the country.
Anyone who zealously advocated for this view was derided as a "Bernie bro" or mocked with sneering suggestions that Bernie was only a viable candidate in white states. (Nevermind that being absolute bunkum) Clinton supporters and other DNC hacks falsely equated working class white people in states like Wisconsin and Ohio supporting a more left-leaning economic program that placed a lesser emphasis on racial & identity issues to engaging in some sort of insidious white male identity politics- and they did so deliberately, to muddy the waters.
They forced a widely reviled, ethically challenged, evasive servant of the establishment who deemed TPP "the gold standard" of trade agreements, supported the Iraq war, was content to let the financial sector completely off the hook for the last financial meltdown and engineered the disastrous Libya intervention down everyone's throat on the premise that Americans didn't have a choice. Anyone who expressed their fear that this would result in a loss to Trump, much less voiced a slight preference for Trump over Clinton (even if absolutely de minimis), was vilified to such a degree that I am confident that it stifled some of the public discussion about how to electorally confront Trump. The only acceptable answer was voting for Hillary Clinton without reservation, even accepting that many criticisms of her were valid was tantamount to enabling fascism.
Look where we are now. There's a lesson in this: you cannot rely on progressive issues on a few social positions as a fig leaf to cover up a massive failure to challenge the systemic rot of our economy, our governmental institutions and our legal system. Standing up for a person's right to peace, security and opportunity irrespective of race, ethnicity or creed is absolutely the right thing to do. Same goes for women's right to make family planning decisions or the rights of gay people to marry and live free of discrimination. None of these can begin to mask massive system-wide failures, that we are seemingly hopelessly chained to an economic paradigm that is grossly indifferent- even actively hostile- to the welfare of the majority of our citizens.
I think Sanders' response to Trump's election is entirely appropriate. If Trump does follow through on some of his challenges to globalization, lobbyists or modernizing and improving our infrastructure, we should offer our qualified support. If he attempts to push through massive deregulation, lopsided tax cuts for the wealthy, stripping of environmental protections, or anything to stoke the flames of bigotry and division we should unite in principled, civil opposition.
Excellent and intelligent post. I especially agree with your last sentence. Trump may have saved us from an insane war with Russia. But mass resistance is called for if he and the blood-red Congress try to turn us into Christo-fascist serfs.Ardnas1936 , 10 Nov 2016 14:5>
Absolutely on target, thanks Naomi! The DLC (Democratic Leadership?? Council) won this for Trump. They may have taken a couple of presidencies--mostly on false promises--but their wishywashy presidents did nothing for real people and worked solely for the rich oligarchs and imperialists. The "Leadership" was only toward the Right. This election was the Revolt of the Rustbelt and the Dead Small Towns. But Drumpf will do nothing for them except postpone, then forget, and finally turn against any who dare complain.John McManus , 10 Nov 2016 14:5>And just think--if not for the DLC stuffed shirts and Wall Street bootlickers who held power in the Dem establishment, we might be happy that Bernie & Jane Sanders--AUTHENTIC feminists and genuine reformers--were going to the White House. I'm 80 years old, may not be around to see the young people's victory, so I get sick thinking of how much we almost gained, but was lost by the DLC Beltway minds and the GOP (Greedy Oil Party) solipsists. We lost more than Trump can guess, until his Miami properties are all swallowed by the sea. It takes a heavy knock on his orange noggin to get that egomaniac's attention.
I firmly believe that we must bring down BOTH of our over-age, limping, idiot-led political parties, or reform them from the grassroots up! (If they can be saved, which I doubt.) It's time to revive the LaFollette Progressive Republicans and the New Deal Democrats, but under different names--and this time NOT just for privileged, "entitled" white males. Yes, I know Bob LaFollette tried to be inclusive, but the time is way past when our children and grandchildren must support and empathize with the entire HUMAN race, not just the paleface branch who've grabbed all the goodies.
As for the macho white males, offer the cowboys a chance to put their he-man cravings to work at the top of wind-powered electric generators 200 feet tall out in the deep ocean, or avoiding glass slashes from large solar trombe wall collectors or even small glass solar cells, or staying alive around unexpected flares of methane, or getting caught in the ebb of a massive tidal bore and swept out to sea. All of these are renewable energy generating systems, safe for the planet but requiring daredevils who would marvel at how comparably un-scary mining and lumberjacking were back in the Olden Days.
Trump was born into the 1% and has stayed there; inherited wealth don't ya know. His policies and those of the Republican hierarchy include : union busting, lower taxes at the top, austerity at the bottom, financial deregulation below 2008 levels, and privatization of government services. Democratic policies are the complete opposite in each of these cases.cielosdeazul , 10 Nov 2016 14:4>
Trump doesn't stand for less neoliberalism but more.
"People have lost their sense of security, status and even identity."FooBar21 Nancy M Ruff , 10 Nov 2016 14:5>That's about the only part that's correct. Globalisation and the threat of open borders is what does that. Everyone wants to feel secure in their home, individually or collectively, without the threat that anyone who likes your home better than theirs can invite themselves over and redecorate.
Canada's elite smugly refuse to recognize that its seeming imperviousness to "ethnophobic nationalism" is precisely because it has secure borders and an immigration policy that selects immigrants.
Obama was elected twice in very recent history. If the country consisted mostlyrichardbunning , 10 Nov 2016 14:3>
of bigots, that would have never happened. To chalk this up to bigotry is
exactly the wrong thing to do - it makes one feel all smug and superior without
bothering to engage with the real issues, like the ones that Klein is discussing.
The Democrats have failed as a party of the middle and working classes. They
are the party of Wall Street bankers and the MIC and the Hollywood elite, who
are more concerned with eating organic arugula and with the bathroom rights of
transgender people than they are with the economic plight of the majority of
people in this country. And they nominated the one person who almost perfectly
embodies this establishment: Clinton - a war mongering, corrupt establishment neoconservative who revels in Hollywood fund raisers with $50,000/person
tickets, gets paid a quarter of million dollars by Goldman Sachs for an 1-hour
speech, and salivates at the prospect of starting more wars in the middle east
and poking Putin in the eye. That's why the lost, not because of bigotry.
It's not bigotry that got Trump elected,
although
This piece is exactly right. The infiltration of the neoliberals has poisoned mainstream politics and hijacked the left. It is given form by the Washington Consensus:jackrousseau , 10 Nov 2016 14:2>1. Fiscal policy discipline, with avoidance of large fiscal deficits relative to GDP;
2. Redirection of public spending from subsidies ("especially indiscriminate subsidies") toward broad-based provision of key pro-growth, pro-poor services like primary education, primary health care and infrastructure investment;
3. Tax reform, broadening the tax base and adopting moderate marginal tax rates;
4. Interest rates that are market determined and positive (but moderate) in real terms;
5. Competitive exchange rates;
6. Trade liberalization: liberalization of imports, with particular emphasis on elimination of quantitative restrictions (licensing, etc.); any trade protection to be provided by low and relatively uniform tariffs;
7. Liberalization of inward foreign direct investment;
8. Privatization of state enterprises;
9. Deregulation: abolition of regulations that impede market entry or restrict competition, except for those justified on safety, environmental and consumer protection grounds, and prudential oversight of financial institutions;
10. Legal security for property rights.
Trump is planning to tear up a lot of this, and he is quite right to do it, even if for the wrong reasons. Globalisation has screwed working people in the developed world and enabled multinationals to form an unholy alliance with the chinese communists to exploit the chinese people to make bigger profits, whilst the old manufacturing base in the developed economies has been hollowed out and sent to China.
The Democratic Party changed fundamentally under Carter/Clinton in the 1980s/1990s. Very much like Labour in the UK changed during the same period under Blair. During that period, both parties morphed from domestic worker's parties into global capitalist parties with (somewhat) progressive social agendas. In both instances, the move away from core left economic values was justified by electability. The sweeping elections of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the early 1990s won the argument and relegated the original base of the parties (workers) to the periphery.Diane Lake jackrousseau , 10 Nov 2016 14:5>Now that neoliberals are no longer electable, what's the justification for their continued existence? No one on the left is happy with their core policies (deregulation, privatization, free trade, unfettered immigration, coziness with corporations/banks, etc.). If they aren't advancing progressive social issues y winning elections, why should we continue putting up with the neolibs co-opting our economic policies?
Ideally, Democrats would use this opportunity to revert back into being a domestic worker's party with genuine progressive/leftist values (much like Labour did in the UK by electing Corbyn). It almost happened with Sanders. Given the enthusiasm/turnout he generated, that's clearly the way forward.
Sadly, if I were betting, I'd imagine the Democratic establishment will do exactly what the Labour establishment did in the UK post Brexit...circle the wagons and double down. And with the anger being directed at Trump rather than the Democratic establishment's malpractice in this botched election, they may get away with it (unlike the Blairites in the UK).
The New Democrats (neoliberals) have been circuling the wagons for awhile now. They have tried to shoot down progressive candidates running in primaries for office and support the neoliberal ones.jackrousseau Diane Lake , 10 Nov 2016 15:2>
The guy who lost to Rubio was a former republican who became a New Democrat while the party shut down any progressives.
It will take alot of battles to change the party back to their New Deal roots. The party saw the reaction to the true son of the New Deal, Bernie Sanders. Instead of taking lessons from that and what the democratic voters craved, they did everything to undermine him and shut him down.
It will take very heavy equipment to remove the entrenched neoliberals from the party and put true democrats in their rightful place
It's strange to watch...the UK seems to be about half an election cycle ahead of us in its rejection of neoliberalism. Everything happening in UK politics is echoed over here about 6 month's later. Down to the fact that, in both countries, wealthy orange haired baboons somehow managed to speak to the disaffected working class. If Gove hadn't snaked Boris Johnson at the death, both countries would currently be led by said orange haired baboons. I mean, what are the odds?wiggystardust , 10 Nov 2016 14:1>Granted, it is the Year of the Monkey per the Chinese calendar...so there might be something in that after all.
Relatedly, I cannot wait until the UK's new Secretary of State has a photo op with our President elect. Which one is the doppelganger?
This is a very decent article, indeed the mainstream left made a deal with the devil and now he's getting his due. But on the other hand I think it's terribly optimistic to assume everything boils down to kick starting a new democratic-socialist movement, raking in all those votes that have just been waiting for it to happen(and only voted for a right wing populist because it didn't yet, sure) and fixing everybody's problems forever.Diane Lake wiggystardust , 10 Nov 2016 15:3>
For one, the neoliberals managed to singlehandedly to make the left look like even more of a villain in the eyes of those who already eschewed it, alienate those who believed in a left solution but were not diehard about it, and fracture the remaining group into niches who refuse to engage in dialogue or even in recognize each other as fellow lefties. Managing to form a stable coalition is a beginning but it only deals with the latter problem, the left still has a huge public image problem to solve before it can make a return.
And for another, the very idea of safety nets and benefits seems to have fallen out of fashion with the electorate: the "I had to climb the hill both ways to get here, so nobody dare cut a tunnel through it" mentality has been on the rise lately. It seems the neoliberals' failures somehow managed to make us all even more individualist, if only a bit more tribal too. Thus, for a new left to rise it wouldn't be enough to restore trust among all the isolated left groups, but also among society as a whole.
But, when you have people homeless, starving, falling through society's cracks you have a rise in crime.MaryCurry , 10 Nov 2016 14:1>
Many who are suffering are not shiftless. Many are working but, don't make enough to pay bills and put food on the table.
Many do not have access to healthcare.
Children go to bed without food.
When society is uncaring, mean and causes undue suffering, society falls apart and into haves and have nots.
All the money that went to help people is the same money that now lines the pockets of the uber wealthy.
Our schools cannot teach with rats and cockroaches, ceillings falling in and no heat. When children cannot get a lunch anymore, how do they learn?
When we cannot pay teachers or even support them, you end up with the bottom of the barrel teaching the upcoming generation inadequately.
You can tell the strength of a society from how it cares for its poor and in need.
Ours is a 'i got mine' selfish shallow society now.
And it is violent and people are filled with hate.
Maybe because we have stopped caring and making sure people have opportunities and jobs and education and help when they fall on hard times.
Agreed, except for the major actors who started this globalization's depression ofN. American and European workers-- the Reagan and the Bush corporate supporters and puppet masters. Clintons and other neolibs have followed suit because they wrongly believed that they could beat them by joining them yet still do a bit of good for their voters. Wrong. But yes, the Revolution continues. Whether it can save the planet -- the environment, however, is doubtful, and nothing matters nearly as much. For years on is far to late.Justthefactsman , 10 Nov 2016 14:0>
Yes it was the Democrats promotion of neo-liberalsim aided by such claptrap as this opinion from another Guardian scribbler.Ardnas1936 Justthefactsman , 10 Nov 2016 15:2>"Centrism has failed these and many other voters. Clinton was not handpicked by the Democratic party's elite: she defeated an unexpectedly successful challenge by self-described socialist Bernie Sanders, partly because of his failure to inspire African Americans. "
That a closet Clinton supporter should have the temerity to write something like this to explain Clintons defeat is beyond belief, when we know from Wikileaks e-mails that the DNC actively opposed Sanders.
The reality is that all politics is dominated by the golden rule: he who has the gold rules.
Well meaning scribblers like Naomi can scribble all they want it will never change the situation. Even revolution will not change the situation for the simple facts are "the oppressed are potential oppressors".
The achievement of dominance and superiority seems to be built into human genes, and why not it is so in the rest of the animal world.
Forget Richard Dawkins, dominance is certainly not universal among living creatures. If a species exists with a plentiful supply of food, domination and competition are unnecessary. Think of the cooperative bonobo and the symbiosis of insects and field flowers. On the other hand, where resources are scare, competition begins and we have social structures like the baboons and leafy trees that kill competitive seedlings by their own shade.Justthefactsman Ardnas1936 , 11 Nov 2016 04:1>However, throughout evolution cooperation outweighs competition. If it didn't we'd still be solitary single-celled amoebae. As things are, our own bodies are well-furnished with microscopic critters from RNA through viruses and bacteria, many of whom run the shop in the background. Cooperation, whether vestigial, symbiotic or by choice, is the way that leads to life. Competition is the way of violence and death. That's not Marxism. It's nature.
"Forget Richard Dawkins, dominance is certainly not universal among living creatures. If a species exists with a plentiful supply of food, domination and competition are unnecessary."Matt Wood , 10 Nov 2016 14:0>
There is a plentiful supply of food for the human species.
So how can you explain the general situation that exists on the planet whereby governing elites control and enjoy the major part of all that human labour creates to the detriment of over 50% of the human population ?
"Neo-fascist responses"? Get over yourself Klein. Trump won because the Clinton's "own" the Democrat Party and they and Goldman Sachs were confident she would be the nominee and millions of gullible Americans would vote for Hillary.Karsten Scheibler , 10 Nov 2016 14:0>By far the best candidate was Bernie Sanders but the Clintons had him run off the road by "Super Delegates". Oh and by the way is it not odd that the Democrats did not change the electoral system when they were in power?
House of Cards comes close to showing us just how ruthless the Clintons really are.
Well, that it is worthwhile reading. At the beginning I thought: good that someone pointed that out. People haven't forgotten NAFTA and Hillary's speeches in closed wall street circles and so on. I just wanted to remark that it was probably a multitude of reasons that explain the Democratic loss. Comey's interference and other stuff that is outright dismissed by the author also played a role. However, as I read on I couldn't help but realize that there seems to be another person who wasn't even aware that Bernie and Elizabeth supported Hillary and wasn't aware of their arguments or the Democratic platform Bernie Sanders fought so hard for. The last two paragraphs speak volumes of Ms. Klein's realism or rather the lack thereof.JTMcPhee gerrygoulde , 10 Nov 2016 14:3>
And how clear does it have to be that "the Network" is and has been purely supra and post-national? How many trillions in dark loot in shadow banks and other asset dumps which the Panama Papers only show a fraction of?kakaran , 10 Nov 2016 13:3>These Fokkers and Fuggers, what drives them? How much is enough? There's always been this cadre of people who figure out how to scam and manipulate and "transcend boundaries," but to the extent that exists today? With the habitability of the planet in question?
But then I have to remember that these people are into self-pleasing on a gargantuan scale, are what we call sociopaths, who have been with the species since "we" figured out how to grow grains and build granaries and walls to protect the granaries and warriors to man the walls and attack the neighbors and take their stuff, and artisans to make the weapons and "improvements," and kings to issue the orders, and priests to justify it all as the Hand and Will of God -- what we call "civilization." And the people at the top have known since forever that if they insulate themselves adequately from the rabble, they face no consequences for their predations, and can live out their lives of looting and indulgence and die comfortably, cared for by loving nurses and doctors who will ease their passing (unlike what the rest of us now face). Because as they have known since forever, "Apres ils le deluge," "IBG-YBG," http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html ,
And what are the rest of us going to do when they have passed on, or fled like the Nazis with the gold from the teeth of millions and the art treasures and other portable wealth of demolished and decimated nations, to live out their lives as CIA "assets" or in comfortable temperate South American and African places? Dig up their corpses and desecrate them, or try to find their "cremains" and burn them again? They do not care what happens to their children, even.
I wish us ordinary people all the luck in the world trying to create and maintain a different order that will let everyone eat only to their honest hunger and drink only to their reasonable thirst...
Couldn't agree more. The neo-liberalism orthodoxy instead of suddenly knocking at the door has come silently home to roost. The Democrats in America and Labor in UK were hand in glove with elites in the greatest robbery the history has ever seen. The concentration of wealth in one percent which was rationalized as panacea of all economic ills has turned out to be an opening of mythical Pandora's box unleashing evils of racism, xenophobia, misogyny etc. The abhorrent echo of "too big to fail" is still heard by the those who were let down by the same oligarchs. I have yet to find an answer to the vexing question as to why enormous benefits of human knowledge and scientific advances be exclusively extracted by one percenters.vacuous , 10 Nov 2016 13:3>
Guardian commentators use identity politics and cries of "racism, sexism and xenophobia" to try and distract the working class from noticing how internationalism, globalization and immigration has stagnated their wages, moved meaningful jobs oversees and stoked up asset prices allowing a homeowner in London to earn more by twiddling their thumbs than their Polish cleaner gets paid in a year.JTMcPhee glauben , 10 Nov 2016 14:5>
No matter how shrill the likes of Owen, Jonathan, Paul, Polly and Hadley try and distract us with their daily dribble of identity politics, we increasingly see them as just another faded facet of the corporatist, internationalist status quo.
The union excesses (which have largely been killed off and the union and former and would-be union workers looted and impoverished along with the rest of the "lower orders) are just part of the disease -- which is corruption, and self-pleasing at the expense of everyone else. Union "leaders," absent disinterested "regulation" by government (which has been mostly corrupted too) and thanks to cooptation by "capitalists," definitely screwed the ordinary people (who one must acknowledge included quite a few rank-and-file that aspired to leadership so they could join the looting).Arnie Arnesen , 10 Nov 2016 13:1>There probably is stuff that needs to be built and manufactured (not the 7,000 pound SUVs and big Dodge and GMC and Ford F-series and "TUNDRA" trucks) to try to keep the species and culture alive. But killing the ability of ordinary people to organize, essentially making unions illegal except in tiny niches, just makes the end-game even worse. And continuing to punch down on working people on account of some 1962 wages (NOT "salaries," these were hourly payrolls, with "benefits" that in may cases like pension funds were subsequently looted by "private equity" vampire-squids and captured-government actions) just makes it harder for ordinary people to come together AS A CLASS and fight the 0.01% for a decent future.
my post on Facebook that mirrors Naomi:shooglebunny , 10 Nov 2016 13:1>
My thoughts about last night:
Bill Clinton's New Democrats were incinerated last night...arrogant, ivy league, sleeping with Wall Street, multinational corporations, insurance companies... and thinking that if they wrap themselves in the social issues from abortion to gay marriage that wage starved workers with enormous bills and debts, evaporating opportunities, disappearing pensions, shit schools and deteriorating infrastructure wouldn't notice they were overlooked and forgotten. This election underscores that Economic injustice is color blind
Good analysis; and exceptionally honest.macktan894 shooglebunny , 10 Nov 2016 13:4>What I want to know though is that, given the reality of what you are saying, did none of this occur to the Democratic party prior t the election?
If they knew all this why did they not respond to it instead of continuing to plough the same old furrow regardless of the likely consequences for ordinary voters?
Why? Because the Dem Elites knew that with Hillary their perks, access, power, etc. was secure. They wanted status quo and, just as they have behaved the past years, failed to listen to their constituencies, ignored them. They should have known just by seeing Bernie's exceptional campaign and the enthusiasm that fueled it, giving him more money than what Hillary often raised from her wealthy donors each month, that no one was excited about more of the same. Arrogantly, they chose to ignore and minimize what was before their eyes.Mardak , 10 Nov 2016 13:1>
The most cogent analysis I have read so far. Bravo Ms. Klein. In a year where the country was screaming for populist change, the Democratic party establishment who had their own highly effective populist candidate, CHOSE to offer up possibly the most "establishment" candidate in history. Fly-over America responded with a sharply erect, if ignorantly self-destructive middle finger.zenkaon , 10 Nov 2016 13:0>
Spot on diagnosis. People are angry that neolibralism has failed them and does not given a damn about them. Clinton offered nothing but the same to too many people. Trump was a molotov cocktail, warts and all, that they got to throw into Washington.tinguinha , 10 Nov 2016 13:0>I don't buy the racist argument. People that elected Obama in 2008 and 2012, but Trump in 2016 are not racist. At the same time I acknowledge that all the KKK people did vote Trump.
Question is, does the left have an answer that is palatable to the people? It would be good if it did, but I'm not holding my breath. Corbyn isn't it, that you can be certain of.
Clinton was a comically bad choice that made no sense whatsoever. The left often gets told that it has to endlessly suffer centrist/neo-liberal "lesser evil" candidates in order to defeat the right as they're more electable, which is an argument that at least makes some logical sense under some circumstances, even if I disagree with it. But in the case of this election, everyone has known for years that Clinton is wildly unpopular, and there was a radical alternative to her available who consistently out-polled her against Trump in the form of Sanders.Lord Lew , 10 Nov 2016 13:0>Now her backers, such as Hadley Freedman on here today, rather than admitting their massive and obvious mistake in supporting her against Sanders and generally backing the "centrist" policies that brought us to this point, are suggesting nonsense such as the idea that those who voted for Trump should be "held responsible." What does that even mean? What are you going to do, elect a new people? You could have had a radical candidate who unlike Clinton could have brought about real change, and unlike Clinton would have attracted many of Trump's blue collar supporters and, you know, won .
All that lesser evil neoliberal politics gives us is a lack of change that allows the right to make even more radical changes during the periods they're in power and eventually leads to the rise of people like Trump, and it's particularly stupid when it throws up deeply unpopular and unelectable people like Clinton, Miliband or the various empty suits lined up against Corbyn. It's time this paper decisively turned its back on the concept.
I don't have a lot of confidence in the prospect of political ideologies forged in the Industrial Age - "left", "right", "conservative", liberal" - being able to meet the challenges of this post-Industrial age and the future beyond.nooriginalthought Lord Lew , 10 Nov 2016 13:2>Western societies are fracturing into ever-smaller social groups defined by different, complex combinations of social/economic/national/ethnic/topographical/sexual/religious factors which mushrooming sub-groups all create their own realities based on the unregulated information they they select from divisive, self-reflexive social media sources rather than inclusive "mainstream" news media which have become increasingly corrupted and not trusted.
Fragmentation, disintegration of societies - these lead to paranoia and aggression aimed at the "other" - and we can see this on both the "left" and the "right" in the blame-games that have followed Brexit and Trump's victory. The 19th century liberals and conservative who provided the foundations for the institutions of Western Democracy didn't foresee the emergence of global corporations and banks with interests that could defy "the national good" or disrupt the moderately equitable distribution of wealth and replace it with a massive diversion of wealth to a tiny global elite (So long affluent workers! Goodbye aspiring middle-class!) - while placating most of the population with a consumerist, material lifestyle mostly funded by debt. The old system is broken.
In both the Brexit referendum and the US election the most striking split was between the old - the over-50s, clinging to the past - and young people, disconnected in their social media silos, wanting a different future but, as a generation, not able to organize and politically express their unhappiness and their hopes for the future because inadequate conventional Left/Right political thinking doesn't chime with the reality of their lives.
Not everyone who voted for Donald Trump is a racist or a misogynist. Not everyone who voted for Hillary Clinton has no sympathy with an unemployed factory worker in a mid-west town whose future has been written off. However, everywhere you look - people are anxious and fearful that "the others" are trying to stop them getting what they solipsistically feel they deserve.
Donald Trump won't be able to get Apple of Walmart to switch their product sourcing from China to the US, nor will he be able to halt the long-term economic decline of the US any more than Theresa May will be able to prevent post-Brexit economic decline in the UK: the challenges our dysfunctional political institutions face are too complex for politicians who are strong on rhetoric and promises but intellectually feeble and cowardly when it comes to decision-making and execution.
We need education, public-service-based information, new political ideas and new political parties that can cut through the destructive white noise of Twitter and Facebook and focus on values that bring people together and counter the greed of the supra-national elites - something more powerful than divisive, out-dated concepts like Left and Right.
What a lot of words to say bugger all.mzlizzi Lord Lew , 10 Nov 2016 14:3>
Why do people with no answers always say we need more education ?We have to get rid of this notion that we US and UK are post industrial.
We have made a huge mistake offshoring our industry and must relocate the more essential parts. We cannot be a service economy without making things.
Bashing metal turning wood molding plastics must be part of our future.
We cannot be a nation of management consultants and hairdressers.
The boom in population during the Boom didn't help. We are overpopulated, and our current economic structure cannot support the material lifestyles and the narratives of freedom that we grew up living with or dreaming about. That's the education that's needed.goldshirt39 Kipwar , 10 Nov 2016 13:5>Until we accept our current situation, we cannot understand or construct new political ideas, parties, or narratives.
Neoliberal globalization is the worst kind of socialism, whether or not it is actually socialism. It's what we're going to get if young people don't become collectively more informed and quickly. There is an attitude of entitlement among young people that drives towards a socialist mentality and the left has picked up the scent. They're going to chase that vote and those disaffected voters are going to chase that lie right down the rabbit hole eventually. If Hillary and Obama have their way, the riots that are being orchestrated right now will start the process immediately.lochinverboy , 10 Nov 2016 12:3>
A very confused article. Neo liberalism is unfettered Global Capitalism given a nice sounding name. It is an invention of the right. To think that the most extreme Republican President ever, will improve the lot of the common man is quite simply bizzare.onlythetruth1 , 10 Nov 2016 12:2>
RutherfordFHEA , 10 Nov 2016 12:2>A good chunk of Trump's support could be peeled away if there were a genuine redistributive agenda on the table. An agenda to take on the billionaire class with more than rhetoric, and use the money for a green new deal
Particularly as Trump himself is a member of that billionaire class and clearly has no interest in redistributing wealth away from himself, or in doing anything to overhaul the economic system that has made him very rich.
Trump was elected US President by riding the same wave of anger & disaffection that fuelled Brexit. Many of those who were disappointed by the result were quick to console themselves with the (wishful) thought that he will not attempt to implement his more radical proposals, or that, if he tries, he will be thwarted by the Republicans (who now hold majorities in both the House and the Senate). It is important to bear in mind however, that any who dare oppose him will know that they do so at the risk of their seats.WinkingJesus , 10 Nov 2016 12:1>
The "Inconvenient Truth" is that the politics of Donald Trump has much in common with movements like Attack and Occupy Wall Street, and hence with Naomi Klein. They both want to stop, or put a break on, international trade. Donald Trump wants to revive local production through protectionism. Klein sees international trade as a source of both environmental and social degradation.BonzoFerret , 10 Nov 2016 12:0>Naomi, thus, carries some responsibility for Donald's success.
The combined Trump/Klein policies would see the old rust belt workers boarding self driven electrical buses to go to work in the new windmill factories. These windmills, normally, would be both more expensive and less effective than if the business was subject to international competition, hence the electricity they produced would be more expensive, giving domestic business a disadvantage.
The new environmental businesses would require support from the public purse (if not, we would already have had them). The taxpayers seem in no mood for such grand scale subsidies.
History does not repeat itself, but in the 1930s the industrial nations raised barriers to trade in order to protect their work forces. As a result, everybody got poorer and reacted by electing extremist politicians.
Michael Moore outlines his post-election strategy. Point 1 is Take over the Democratic Party and return it to the people. They have failed us miserably.Nada89 , 10 Nov 2016 12:0>Exactly the same as what is happening in the Labour Party. But in that case The Guardian supports neoliberalism and seeks to undermine the ones who are trying to change things.
Klein's diagnosis is depressingly accurate.Tom Wessel , 10 Nov 2016 12:0>Sadly I think the electorate in some western societies are in danger of becoming just as ineffective as 'the proles' in 1984, while the vice like grip of the military/industrial complex is just as tenacious as that exerted by Big Brother and the party.
Since the entire political class, or least those with any clout all sing from the same hymn sheet while moderate, or leftist figures, like Corbyn, or Sanders, are bound to be shredded by their own party and by the media, then what hope, eh, unless that hope is something new and outside of party politics?
Thank you, thank you, thank you Naomi. Even after an unbelievable defeat, the neoliberals still don't get it. Blame game articles are starting already but no self reflection.Gem59 , 10 Nov 2016 11:3>The how and why:
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/09/democrats-trump-and-the-ongoing-dangerous-refusal-to-learn-the-lesson-of-brexit /
The role of the media (The Guardian included big time) have a responsibility and offended people's intelligence and sensitivity about democracy, elites etc. Now they are running for cover. Today, Hadley Freeman writes "Misogyny won the US election – let's stop indulging angry white men". Disgrace, offensive and arrogant. Also, Hadley Freeman with "The US has elected its most dangerous leader"...No remorse, no responsibility, blaming American people for being angry, for swallowing the same medicine again...KillerMarmot Gem59 , 10 Nov 2016 11:5>Compare the Guardian and AP (recall who called California early and rigged the pre-selection against Sanders?) and Waleed Aly here: ( http://www.theage.com.au/comment/us-election-2016-its-not-about-racism-or-sexism-its-about-class-warfare-20161109-gslxzs.html)...What options did the "forgotten", vast majority, the "insignificant other", the disadvantaged, the powerless have? When one is drowning, the relatively privileged onlooker has a duty to help rather than blame the one drowning for "pulling our hair". Of course the future looks terribly bleak for democracy, gender/racial relations etc...
Seriously, could Clinton be an answer for the family that struggles to pay rent, the homeless, the unemployed, those scared of terrorism or a WWIII, the working poor, those in debt due to college fees, those who lost their house and jobs for the sake of "free trade"...These are many, many people folks...real people with flesh, dreams and humanity...
Understanding their pain and their lack of options (thanks to NDC & the Media) does not mean one identifies with Trump and the ugly fascist monsters creeping behind him...It's not about us or one's dream about equality, freedom...It's about survival & human dignity for millions of US people...
Did the demonizing of many working people send them straight to Trump land? Waleed Aly: "progressives have treated the working class largely as a source of xenophobia ... ignore it at our peril" --
I agree. The Freeman article was a disgrace.TheDudleyOmmer , 10 Nov 2016 11:2>She fails to see that such arrogance was precisely what many Trump supporters were voting against.
Excellent article much of which could have been written during the past thirty years.Whereangelsfear , 10 Nov 2016 11:1>We all know hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I was puzzled as to why Mrs Clinton seemed to cold shoulder Bernie Sanders. He had already connected with many of the 'left behind' by putting a Social Democratic view opposite to Mr Trump's views. Both had identified the problems that the Chicago economists and neoliberalism had caused, but not having Mr Sanders involved or even accepting that his views would be part of her next administration, Mrs Clinton left the field open to her opponent. If only she had remembered her husband's slogan 'Its the economy, stupid', it may have turned fire on Trump's campaign.
There is an irony that although it was right wing politicians who bought in the neo liberal policies which have impoverished working people, it is the social democratic parties on both sides of the Atlantic who have suffered by trying to make neoliberalism work. They could not demonstrate however how 'trickledown' benefitted the poorest and the image left was of rich people sucking up more wealth and more influence over politicians as Ms Klein points out.
On our side of the Atlantic Mrs Thatcher ensured that the right have a strong supportive press due to her ownership reforms and the right is gradually weakening our BBC so that any opposition views will be stifled. Mr Corbyn has already been character assassinated. It remains to be seen if Mr Trump carries out his threats to the American press supporters of Mrs Clinton to reinforce only right wing views.
The smell of authoritarian regimes is now appearing in many places.
There was an almost dynastic arrogance in the Clinton's assumption that they would carry the day. I have often been impressed with Bill's eloquence and Hillary's tough fight for a rational health and insurance system, but have never heard a word of self-criticism about the dire effects of deregulation and the financial crisis. The democrats missed their chance for radical measures when they had control of Congress just after Lehman Bros.stuart6233 Marangaranga , 10 Nov 2016 11:4>
Still, for international affairs, climate change, any sane kind of approach Trump is an unmitigated disaster. Hillary has much experience in international affairs, but her opportunism in the wake of 9/11 had led her to support the intervention in Iraq. Of course we were all opposed to Saddam's régime, but not with those means and in that kind of way, made much worse of course by Bush jr. Islamic State is a direct consequence of the chaos and unemployment in Iraq created under the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld administration.
"Neo-fascist responses"KelvinYearwood , 10 Nov 2016 10:3>
"Trump-style extremism"
"they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women"You call my right to vote the way I choose "stupid".
You just don't get it. Millions of Americans voted exactly this way. A big middle finger to the establishment, media, Wall Street, "experts", and yes moral posturing know-it-alls is a great way to use your vote.You completely misunderstand Trump. He is far more for the working man than Clinton. The poor voted for him in droves. And for good reason.
Well said Naomi.bunkl , 10 Nov 2016 10:1>I am an angry white male, and I am not a misogynist, as this paper would have it.
I am fully aware of the appalling nature of Donald Trump.On the other hand, I fully understand the bureaucratic nature of the Democrat Party, the embedded interests of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex in that bureaucracy, the dirty tricks that that bureaucratic machinery got up to in order to extinguish Bernie Sander's campaign.
I am aware of how that machinery has been ramping up a situation of global conflict, shamelessly recreating an aggressive Cold war Mk II situation with Russia and China, which is simply cover for the US racist colonial assumption that the world and its resources belongs to it in its sense of itself as an exceptional entity fulfilling its manifest destiny upon a global stage that belongs to its exceptional, wealthy and powerful elites.
And I am aware of how Hillary was so keen to service this reality and American image of itself. And to go beyond that, and bomb Libya for 6 months, killing thousands of civilians (Middle eastern unpeople) and, may I suggest, doing nothing whatsoever for the women of Libya. Quite the opposite!
Michael Moore, in a talk in which he predicted the victory of Trump before the election, notes how Trump went into an American car factory and told the executives of that company that if they relocated to Mexico, he would put a huge tax on their cars coming into America. Not all was misogyny in the vote for Trump. Whether he delivers on his threat or not, unlike the democrat bureaucratic machinery, he showed he was actually listening to working class Americans and that he was ;prepared to face up to company executives.
What has this paper got to say about Hillary and the Democrat Party's class bigotry – its demonstrable contempt for 10s of millions of Americans whose lives are worse now than in 1973, while productivity and wealth overall has skyrocketed over those 43 years.
What has this paper got to say about the lives of African American women, which have been devastated by Republican/Democrat bipartisan policy over the last 43 years?
What has Hadley Freeman got to say about Hillary's comment that President Mubarek of Egypt was "one of the family? A president whose security forces used physical and sexualised abuse of female demonstrators in the Arab Spring?A feminist would need more than a peg on their nose to vote for Hillary – a feminist would need all the scented oils of Arabia. Perhaps Wahhabi funded Hillary can buy them up.
Great article, but Hilary was hardly responsible for privatization and austerity in the USA. She only had 2 terms in the senate (and was only one of 450+ in congress). She was in fact mildly center-left and at least nominally and aginst the TPPA. She could have led a progressive congress (as in the Johnson year) if her coattails were long enough.Quiller , 10 Nov 2016 10:1>I have never in my long life ever seen a politician so demonized... not by the mainstream media, but by the new media run mostly by the alt-right and funded by the likes of the Koch brothers. It worked.
The climate accord is now finished ..any movement towards single payer or paid parental leave, minimum wage increase ...gone. - military spending is now going up, and Trump is proposing tolls on all roads -all to be privatized to pay for tax cuts for the top earners. and this is tip of the iceberg...and not including the racist upswing.
That said, the DNC has a lot to answer for with its undemocratic superdelegates and documented undemining of Sanders...as did the media who either ignored him or unfairly lambasted him. The RealClearPolitics average from May 6-June 5 had Sanders at 49.7% to Trump's 39.3%, a 10.4-point cushion...polling that included independents. In that same time frame, Trump was polling close to Clinton and was even ahead in multiple polls. Most people were well aware of Sander's so-called "socialist" label since October the previous year, so I'm unclear if that would have been a factor in the general election.
An analysis of the media is long over due : It was remarkable to see the media, including American media, go into shock mode and scramble to reorganise the script and the thinking to run a perspective on what was happening on the night the votes were counted. The media had conditioned themselves to a Clinton win. Clearly the editors and the reporters were not out on the streets and in the hustings getting all the messages. The Guardian is in shock mode after the British Referendum and the American Presidential Election. The most politically dangerous person is a discontented voter with a ballot paper. How could the media have not spotted in advance what was happening ? I do not buy the lazy perspective that the voters deceived the media into their voting intentions. Personally, I think the media have got fat and lazy and need to come out from behind their editorial desks.DaveLester FrankyJane , 10 Nov 2016 10:1>
SlumVictim , 10 Nov 2016 09:2>This article is brilliant. Truth in spades.
Naomi, has omitted one very important detail: automation, i.e. the use of AI to replace jobs.
This absolutely requires us to restructure society to provide security and purpose to each every one of us who is not part of the super rich owners.
For example we will see driving jobs rapidly disappearing within the next five to ten years.
I also notice that where the worst effects of rampant capitalism are ameliorated there appear to be fewer issues. I'm thinking of many Western European nations where the issues do not yet seem to have the over fifty percent traction that they have in the US and the UK. If Australia were suffering a similar economic slow down it may well join the US and UK. But what's happening in Canada and New Zealand?
The problem with centre left parties throughout the western world is that they sold out to corporate capitalism, which forced people who rejected neoliberalism to go to the extremes to protest. The question is, once someone's loyalty has been broken, it is that much more difficult to win loyalty back, if it is possible at all.empestteacup SlumVictim , 10 Nov 2016 11:5>
Good, concise post.zephirine tempestteacup , 10 Nov 2016 12:1>And you're right - the neoliberal capture of centre-left legacy parties from the Democrats to the German SPD and French Socialist Party has created an exceptionally unpromising landscape and public mood. Trust has been broken. Responsibilities betrayed. Intellectual traditions traduced, distorted, or simply cast aside.
In moments of humiliation or defeat - and make no mistake, this was both - there needs to be reflection and a willingness to return to first principles as well as evolving new strategies and insights appropriate to the present.
Economic realities shape cultural and social relations. The left should always listen to the experiences of people and build a consensus based on solidarity between groups and not the alienated support of different self-interested demographics. Exploitation is the corner-stone of capitalism when it is left to run unchecked. Without regulation, capitalism tends towards monopolies that end up subverting democracy itself.
These are the issues Bernie Sanders raised and the enthusiasm with which it was greeted is testimony to the fact that there are white working class voters hungry for a politics of positive, radical social change. Intoning with robotic piety that the people have never had it so good despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary is a form of deceit; when it comes from the mouths of corporate Democrats, it is political obscenity.
tempestteacup zephirine , 10 Nov 2016 12:3>I think what I've realised from the Brexit and Trump results is how desperate people are for something to believe in. What used to be called 'the vision thing'.In moments of humiliation or defeat - and make no mistake, this was both - there needs to be reflection and a willingness to return to first principles
For decades we've had to choose between different forms of managerialism and variations on a theme of 'there is no alternative to rule by the market'. We just had to put up and shut up, there was nothing to get excited about. Nobody's ever jumped up and down shouting "What do want? Trickle-down economics! When do we want it? Now!"
The thing about demagogues is they offer that emotional release. What we need is principled political movements that also enable it.
Absolutely right. One of the by-products of There Is No Alternative, though, is that managerialism and wonkiness have been fetishised. Hillary Clinton's devastatingly uninspiring offer to the American people was hailed by some as a mark of her "maturity", "experience", and "competence". Bernie Sanders, by contrast, was attacked for firing people up, for inspiring them to believe change was possible - by implication, of course, such attacks rest on the belief that change is in fact not possible at all. It is a bleak nihilism that states the best that can be hoped or organised for is a slightly better management of existing structures.eyelacesforyou , 10 Nov 2016 09:2>There is a hypocrisy, too, when someone like Clinton derides Trump's economic plans as "Trumped-up trickle-down". In reality, they were arguing simply over who would offer the *bigger* tax cuts. The notion that there were alternative visions on the economy, on climate change, on racial equality or healthcare and education, not to mention foreign policies, was almost completely absent.
This is why I wrote that in some ways Hillary Clinton was the greater evil in this election. It is one thing to hark backwards to a mythical past, as Donald Trump did. It is quite another to put such tight constraints on the entire notion of what is possible in the future. Trump offered nostalgia. Clinton offered the tyranny of low expectations - forever.
But that is all in the past now - for the future, I agree with you that there needs to be a willingness to offer radical, inspirational and visionary alternatives to a system that has simply not worked for the majority of people who through no fault of their own find their quality of life, possibilities and security in decline while wealth flows ceaselessly upwards and into the pockets of those already insulated from the harm their favoured politicians unleash.
Bernie showed what can be done - he also showed that people are willing to finance such campaigns and thus liberate the political process from the death-grip of corporate donations. Personally, I am sceptical of whether the Democratic Party is an appropriate vehicle for such politics (I know that Bernie doesn't agree with me!) Regardless, his campaign should provide somewhat of a model for what can be done - and likewise his statement from today. Amidst the headlong rush - in this paper as well - to denigrate and smear voters for failing to advance bourgeois liberal interests, it is imperative that deprived, working class voters of all races are listened to properly and not labelled racists and bigots. A few no doubt are. But these are, in many instances, the same people that helped elect Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. They are crying out for something to organise around. Hillary Clinton failed because she was not and never has been a person capable of, even interested in, offering that.
This is a great article. Alas, I fear it is all too late.Everyone knew what was wrong with Clinton and the whole rotten DNC operation, but they supported her anyway. When her flaws were pointed out, people kept saying 'but she's a woman.' As if that even mattered.
Fundamentally the left has to abandon its obsession with identity politics, embrace national identity and individual liberty. Then it will be able to get over its economic message and win the day.
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Nov 11, 2016 | crookedtimber.org
mclaren 11.10.16 at 10:42 am 162
Raven Oathill in #145 says: "Oh, for examples of Trumpian fascism I forgot advocating torture …"
Barack Obama continued Bush-era torture, only slightly differently. Obama restricted torture to Appendix M of the CIA's interrogation manual - that's the manual that the CIA created by studying the Chinese communist's Mao-era thought reform torture methods. Appendix M prohibits cutting and beating in favor of sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, cold, noise assault, and other methods like the water drip method. These forms of torture leave no marks but drive people insane or destroy their minds as surely as the standard three weeks of non-stop beatings favored in Lubyanka.
Let's not forget that the American president who began our current ride on the torture carousel was Bill Clinton, who initiated "extraordinary rendition" (AKA fly prisoners to third world countries in CIA chartered Lear jets and let third world dictators torture the victims for us).
https://www.aclu.org/other/fact-sheet-extraordinary-rendition
The problem with the smug top-4% narrative of the Democratic elite's professional class that "It's all about racism!" is that many of the counties in red states that went heavily for Trump in this election went even more heavily for Bernie Sanders. A lot of states that voted for Trump in this election voted for Obama in the last election.
What, did those Rust Belt states suddenly decide to not become racist when Obama ran, and then became racist again when Trump ran? How does that work? "A black guy is running for president, so I'm going to stop being a racist and vote for him. Oh, wait, now a white guy is running for president, so I'm going to become a racist again." Does that make sense?
No, the more credible explanation is: 1) Barack Obama very eloquently promised Hope and Change in 2008 and 2012. 2) Barack Obama systematically broke his promises of hope and change.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoSnqofelsQ
- http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html
- http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/243850-obama-signs-nsa-bill-renewing-patriot-act-powers
- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/oral-history/financial-crisis/tags/should-obama-have-been-tougher-on-banks/
3) Hillary Clinton promised to continue Obama's policies. 4) Working people who had voted for Obama in the hope that he truly would change things lost patience and got sick of Democrats who (in the words of one millenial) "promise everything and change nothing."
Populism is the real explanation for Trump's victory. ...he talked about stopping the globalization that's destroying the American middle class and ending our crazy endless unwinnable foreign wars. By contrast, Hillary Clinton gave $225,000 speeches to Goldman Sachs hedge fund traders in which she said the "banker-bashing so popular within both parties was unproductive and indeed foolish."
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-vampire-squid-tells-us-how-to-vote-20160205
Meanwhile Bill Clinton dismissed the American population's rage at the bankers who crashed the world economy with the comment: `"You could take Lloyd Blankfein in an alley and slit his throat, and it would satisfy them for about two days," Clinton said. "Then the blood lust would rise again."'
Did I mention that Hillary's daughter Chelsea is married to former Goldman Sachs hedge fund manager Mark Mezvinsky? They recently bought a pre-WW I ten million dollar townhouse overlooking Madison Square Park. So much for Chelsea's "zero dollar salary." I don't know a lot of people with a salary of zero dollars who can afford to buy 10.5 million dollar apartments in the upper West Side of New York. Do you?
Hillary has wooed defense contractors with the love that dare not speak its name (the love of foreign intervention, AKA burning brown babies by the bushel-load) and she has promised lots more endless unwinnable wars around the globe, disguised as the sound-bite "America needs a more assertive foreign policy."
`"It is clear that she is behind the use of force in anything that has gone on in this cabinet. She is a Democratic hawk and that is her track record. That's the flag she's planted," said Gordon Adams, a national security budget expert who was an associate director in President Bill Clinton's Office of Management and Budget.
`Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who has spent her post-service days protesting the war policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, is more blunt.
"Interventionism is a business and it has a constituency and she is tapping into it," she tells TAC. "She is for the military industrial complex, and she is for the neoconservatives."'
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-military-industrial-candidate/
By way of contrast, here's Donald Trump giving a speech on foreign policy:
"Unfortunately, after the Cold War, our foreign policy veered badly off course. We failed to develop a new vision for a new time. In fact, as time went on, our foreign policy began to make less and less sense. Logic was replaced with foolishness and arrogance, and this led to one foreign policy disaster after another. We went from mistakes in Iraq to Egypt to Libya, to President Obama's line in the sand in Syria. Each of these actions have helped to throw the region into chaos, and gave ISIS the space it needs to grow and prosper.
"It all began with the dangerous idea that we could make Western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interest in becoming a Western Democracy. We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed. Civil war, religious fanaticism; thousands of American lives, and many trillions of dollars, were lost as a result. The vacuum was created that ISIS would fill. Iran, too, would rush in and fill the void, much to their unjust enrichment. Our foreign policy is a complete and total disaster. No vision, no purpose, no direction, no strategy."
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/trump-foreign-policy-15960
Do I believe that Trump meant any of that? Of course not. Did Trump change his foreign policy stance five minutes after he gave that speech? Probably. Is the rest of that Trump foreign policy speech crazy and counterfactual? Obviously - especially the part where Trump claims that America's military is underfunded (!)
But the point here is that Trump actually at least talked about these screwups. He talked about America's mad wars around the globe. He talked about how American leaders couldn't stop getting into endless unwinnable foreign quagmires after the Cold War ended. Every ordinary American knows this stuff. But no one in Washington was talking about it - except Trump. Hillary, who voted for the Iraq war of 2003 and tried to convince president Obama to bomb Iran rather than negotiate, certainly never wanted to mention any of these inconvenient problems. And our beloved president Obama's response was "America is already great." Torture? Endless wars? Collapsing middle class? Burgeoning poverty? Skyrocketing child malnutrition? Bankers asset-stripping the economy? No problem, America is already great. Enjoy!
Sanders and Trump were the only candidates who talked about American corporations shipping jobs overseas. Sanders and Trump were the only candidates who talked about bankers looting the population and crashing the world economy and paying themselves bonuses out of the publicly-funded bailout money. Sanders and Trump were the only candidates who talked about how globalization is destroying the U.S. middle class.
The professionals with advanced degrees who make $80,000 a year or more (the top 4% of the American population) are the ones who control the Democratic party today. And they made sure Sanders never got the nomination. These self-styled Big Brains have decided to treat ordinary working folks and peons who have a mere bachelor's degree and no professional credential (Ma, PhD, M.D., LLD, JD) the same way Jim Crow Southerners used to treat black people.
Everyone without an advanced degree is now treated by the leaders of the Democratic party as one of "those people," ungrateful curs who have the unbelievable gall to criticize their betters. "Those people" have the insufferable temerity to question the wiser and smarter and far more wealthy doyens of the Democratic party, the masterminds with professional credentials, the geniuses who assure them that the TPP is spiffy and globalization is absolutely marvy-doo and global wage arbitrage is just dreamy.
To the professional class top-4% who run the Democratic party, working people and scum with a mere bachelor's degree are inferior creatures, not ready for self-governance. "Those people" must be guided by a superior breed, the elites with advanced degrees, those wise enough to have gotten things right by invading Iraq. And deregulating the banks. And making sure Bernie Sanders never got the Democratic nomination. And writing those marvelous zero-hours work contracts that let employers force employees to call in every morning to see if they get a shift that day.
"Those people" without advanced degrees need careful management, since they have no impulse control, they're filthy and smelly, they're really animals who can't help drinking and carousing and breeding. "Those people" never had the discipline to get a masters or an M.D., so they need a firm hand, and the strict guidance of the All-Powerful Market to keep them in check. Sound familiar? Sort of like, oh, say, Deep South slaveowners talking about their slaves circa 1840?
Populism. That's the reason why Trump won. ... he's the only one of the two presidential candidates who sounded any genuinely populist notes during the campaign. When Hillary was asked if she wanted to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, she said "no." When Hillary was asked about foreign wars, she lapsed into the old "indispensable nation" crap. When Hillary was asked about single-payer health care she called it "something that will never, ever happen."
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hillary-clinton-single-payer-health-care-will-never-ever-happen/
Gee, I wonder why Hillary lost? It's such a puzzle. Racism! That's it! It must be racism!
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Nov 11, 2016 | discussion.theguardian.com
sou812 3h ago 0 1 The Democrats abandoned the only people that are paying the bills in this country - period! And the working class sent a message loud and clear. The arrogance and ignorance of he left is astounding: focused on the novelty of getting a woman elected to the presidency even though she was the worst of choices. An arrogant, dishonest, bought and paid for Wall Street elitist like her husband, they thought that her experience was enough to seal her success. Ta!
The Dem's have lost it all and it will take two decades to recover, if ever.
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Nov 11, 2016 | discussion.theguardian.com
, 10 Nov 2016 12:4>After 8 years of "no change" Obama, a president totally owned by the corporations, banks, big money etc. and the man who failed to do anything about that huge and ever widening wealth gap the Democrats were obviously out of favour with the poor working class. But the voters seem to have forgotten than Trump still stands for the Republicans and thats where he will enrol his cabinet from, he can not act alone. Those same weak, ineffective ultra right loonies that stood against Trump and made him look special will now stand with him in government. Its still money politics.
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Nov 08, 2016 | www.nytimes.com
What we do know is that people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times, truly didn't understand the country we live in. We thought that our fellow citizens would not, in the end, vote for a candidate so manifestly unqualified for high office, so temperamentally unsound, so scary yet ludicrous.
We thought that the nation, while far from having transcended racial prejudice and misogyny, had become vastly more open and tolerant over time.
We thought that the great majority of Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law.
It turns out that we were wrong. There turn out to be a huge number of people - white people, living mainly in rural areas - who don't share at all our idea of what America is about. For them, it is about blood and soil, about traditional patriarchy and racial hierarchy. And there were many other people who might not share those anti-democratic values, but who nonetheless were willing to vote for anyone bearing the Republican label.
I don't know how we go forward from here. Is America a failed state and society? It looks truly possible.
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Nov 08, 2016 | www.moonofalabama.org
Kalen | Nov 8, 2016 3:21:04 AM | 73
It is shockingly disappointing that MOA, this otherwise intelligent incisive, a deeply intellectual and factual blog's readership exhibit a trait common to overall American anti-intellectual sheeple constituency as Gore Vidal posited decades ago, having no shame expressing their utter confusion and ignorance about one fundamental fact of reality they are facing.THE FACT: The US elections are a staged political farce with NO MATERIAL IMPACT on the US imperial policies, domestic or international WHATSOEVER. And that's the fact based on rock solid empirical evidences also MOA proliferates that only a mental patient can deny.
SO WHAT THE F.U.CK ALL OF YOU PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT? "Voting" for this or that? NONSENSE;
Those political puppets, stooges of oligarchy are no alternatives to the calcified imperial system itself, they never have been and they never will. They are new/old faces of the same old 240 y.o. Anglo-American imperial regime based on ancient and modern slavery and they already declared it by submitting to it via pledging to run in this farcical rigged electoral fallacy.
All at the end will openly pledge unwavering support for the regime and their rotten deeply corrupted parties while abandoning their gullible voters.
Supporters of any of these plastic puppets of oligarchy not unlike a cargo cult, are impatient, nervous, excited and scared sitting and waiting before an impregnable curtain of political deceit, lies and manipulation by the ruling elite in front of their wide shut eyes , turning to magic, superstition, appeasement, making up stories, poems out of their incoherent utterances filed with tautologies, innuendos and absurd, begging for mercy or praying for a caprice of good will to save them ultimately in a form of fake, meaningless political turds passing as empty "political" platform promises while blatantly abandoning their unalienable rights to independence, self-determination and democratic system of people's rule, based on equality in the law, and one voter one vote principle, for a role of a meddlesome spectators to their own execution.
THE FACT: The democratic electoral system worth participating does not exist in the US but none of the candidates would utter this truth as long as they can benefit from the fraud and that includes third parties. If this was a true change or revolution, that we desperately need, honest leaders would not run their campaign within the corrupted system set up by and for two oligarchic parties but they would decry and utterly reject it.
Think people, all the so-called candidates even third party candidates are just nibbling on the behemoth of abhorrent and brutal US imperial power mostly with utterances that they never intended to follow if they wanted to survive terror of the US security apparatus, while peddling the lies about small incremental changes and stealing ours and our children future by asking us to wait, be patient, and begging ruling elite for mercy and may be for some crumbs from an oligarchs' table after they are not able to gorge themselves anymore with our blood sweat and tears.
Unfortunately, this time as well, millions of irrational, desperate and helpless in their daily lives electoral zombies such as those, under a spell of exciting political masquerade, regrettably also on this blog, will be aligning themselves with one or the other anointed by establishment winner [whoever it will be] of a meaningless popularity/beauty contest, in a delusional feat of transference of a fraction of elite's power to themselves just for a second of a thrill of illusion of power, illusion of feelings that something depends on me, that I can make a difference, a delusion of holding skies from falling and by that saving the world common among paranoid mental patients.
And they will continue to authorize their own suicide mission, since even baseless, continually disproved hope of Sisyphus, of any chance of influencing of the political realm via means of begging is the last thing that dies.
THE LOUD POLITICAL BOYCOTT OF THIS FARCE, UTTER REJECTION OF THIS FACADE OF DEMOCRATIC CHOICE, REJECTION OF ANY POLITICAL LEGITIMACY OF THIS SORRY SPECTACLE IS THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE AVAILABLE TO ANY DECENT PERSON, INDEPENDENT, SOVEREIGN CITIZEN WHO TAKES A MORAL STAND REJECTING ENSLAVEMENT RIGHT HERE AND RIGHT NOW.
THE REST WILL JUST PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE TO THEIR OWN CHAINS.
MAKE YOU CHOICE.
Posted by: Kalen | Nov 8, 2016 3:21:04 AM | 73
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economistsview.typepad.com
anne -> anne... , November 07, 2016 at 01:47 PM
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/the-truth-about-the-sanders-movement/ilsm -> anne... , November 07, 2016 at 03:53 PMMay 23, 2016
The Truth About the Sanders Movement
By Paul KrugmanIn short, it's complicated – not all bad, by any means, but not the pure uprising of idealists the more enthusiastic supporters imagine.
The political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels have an illuminating discussion of Sanders support. The key graf that will probably have Berniebros boiling is this:
"Yet commentators who have been ready and willing to attribute Donald Trump's success to anger, authoritarianism, or racism rather than policy issues have taken little note of the extent to which Mr. Sanders's support is concentrated not among liberal ideologues but among disaffected white men." ...
[ Yes, I do find defaming people by speculation or stereotype to be beyond saddening. ]
poor pk a leader of the Stalinist pressanne -> Chris Lowery ... , November 07, 2016 at 10:28 AMThe fact that Obama either won, or did so much better than Hillary appears to be doing with, the white working-class vote in so many key battleground states, as well as the surprising success of Bernie Sanders -- a Brooklyn-born, Jewish socialist -- in the primaries is solid proof that the electorate was open to a coherent argument for genuine progressive change, and that a substantial portion of that electorate is not acting on purely racist and sexist impulses, as so many progressive commentators say.JohnH : , November 07, 2016 at 10:26 AMAnd her opponent was/is incapable of debating on substance, as there was/is neither coherence nor consistency in any part of his platform -- nor that of his party....
[ Compelling argument. ]
Question is, will Krugman be able to move on after the election...and talk about something useful? Like how to get Hillary to recognize and deal with inequality...JohnH : , November 07, 2016 at 10:29 AMBarbara Ehrenreich: "Forget fear and loathing. The US election inspires projectile vomiting. The most sordid side of our democracy has been laid out for all to see. But that's only the beginning: whoever wins, the mutual revulsion will only intensify... With either Clinton or Trump, we will be left to choke on our mutual revulsion."JohnH -> JohnH... , November 07, 2016 at 10:29 AMLink: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/03/us-election-projectile-vomiting-barbara-ehrenreichJohnH -> Bloix... , November 07, 2016 at 04:59 PM"I will live my life calmly and my children will be just fine. I will live my life calmly and my children will be just fine." That assumes you're about 85 years old...and don't have long to live!ilsm -> JohnH... , November 07, 2016 at 03:54 PMthe great mortification, these two.cm -> JohnH... , November 07, 2016 at 11:11 PMLaid out by whom? By the commercial "media" hype machine that has 12-16 hours of airtime to fill every day with the as sensationalized as possible gossip (to justify the price for the paid advertisements filling the remaining hours).Tom aka Rusty : , November 07, 2016 at 11:17 AMSomething interesting today.... President Obama came to Michigan. I fully expected him to speak in Detroit with a get out the vote message. Instead he is in Ann Arbor, speaking to an overwhelmingly white and white-collar audience. On a related note, the Dems have apparently written off the white blue collar vote in Michigan, even much of the union vote. the union leaders are pro Clinton, but the workers not so much. Strange year.ilsm -> Tom aka Rusty... , November 07, 2016 at 03:55 PMKillary Clinton got no closer than Ann Arbor this weekend, a message!John M : , November 07, 2016 at 11:26 AMThe real danger of serious election-rigging: electronic voting machines. How do we know the machine *really* recorded everyone's votes correctly? (Did any Florida county ever give Al Gore negative something votes?)Julio -> John M ... , November 08, 2016 at 06:42 AMThat's a big subject but you are right, that is the biggest risk of significant fraud. Not just the voting machines, but the automatic counting systems. Other forms of possible election fraud are tiny by comparison.Enquiring Mind : , November 07, 2016 at 11:48 AMHere is the transcript from 60 Minutes about the Luntz focus group rancor. Instructive to read about the depth of feeling in case you didn't see the angry, disgusted faces of citizens.ScottB : , November 07, 2016 at 12:08 PMhttp://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-american-voters-on-trump-clinton/
Mr. Krugman forgot to list the collusion of the DNC and the Clinton campaign to work against Sanders.ilsm -> ScottB... , November 07, 2016 at 03:57 PMputting crooked in the same sentence as Clinton or DNC is duplicative wording. This mortification is brought to US by the crooked and the stalinist press that calls crooked virtue.Before the 1970s the US was both rich and protectionist - no look at our horrible roads and hopeless people - the miracle of free trade! : , November 07, 2016 at 07:13 PMKrugman did so much to help create the mass of white working class discontent that is electing Trump. Krugman and co cheering on NAFTA/PNTR/WTO etc, US deindustrialization, collapse of middle class...Hopefully the working class masses will convince our rulers to abandon free trade before every last factory is sold off or dismantled and the US falls to the depths of a Chad or an Armenia.
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Nov 08, 2016 | www.moonofalabama.org
Perimetr | Nov 8, 2016 4:34:49 AM | 77ProPeace | Nov 8, 2016 7:02:55 AM | 80The heartland of the US is RED, solid RED.
The neolibcons are printing up their Newsweek mags with Madam President on the cover.They don't have a clue about how pissed off the people in the "flyover states" are.
Fuck their rigged polls and lying news.
Sure Trump is behind or neck-and-neck . . . Just like we have 5% unemployment.
As long as you don't count the 1/3 of working age people who DON"T HAVE A JOB.
The deplorables can think of 650,000 reasons why Hillary should be in PRISON, even if the FBI can't.
We don't want World War 3 with Russia. We want our factories and jobs back, we would like to spend $1 trillion a year on infrastructure instead of blowing up yet another Middle Eastern nation.
Fuck Hillary, Fuck the neolibcons, Fuck al-CIAda, Fuck the fascist banksters who eat our children for breakfast.
@RayB | Nov 8, 2016 12:18:53 AM | 62 "The only real issue here is either war or peace."rufus magister | Nov 8, 2016 7:26:46 AM | 81Yes, especially that the US has war-based, or "blood economy" (like diamonds).
Interesting tidbits:
- Here's what happened when a Hillary supporting MIT professor decided to analyze her emails…
- ABC News Caught Staging Fake Crime Scene " The Event Chronicle
- Clinton Is the Most Dangerous Person Alive
... ... ...
fairleft at 43 --Jackrabbit | Nov 8, 2016 8:03:07 AM | 82Do not blow shit up, like the political system, without a clear idea where the pieces will land and how you will put them back together. Crisis would benefit the right, not the left, given the current correlation of class and political forces.
The best result. sadly, would be a resounding win for Mrs. Clinton. As the comment at 11 shows, anything less than a crushing defeat will enable the alt-right and embolden the most reactionary and nativist elements in society.
The notion that worsening conditions will automatically produce progressive revolution is a pipe-dream. Beaten-down folks struggling to survive don't have the time or energy to organize.
Vote your conscience, your hopes. Takingg the long view, I am again voting, as I have for years, for the Socialist Workers Party.
rufus @81:Do not blow shit up ...The corrupt 'Third Way' Democrats blew up U.S. democracy years ago. "Do not blow shit up" = BOHICA.
The best result. sadly, would be a resounding win for Mrs. Clinton.... I am again voting, as I have for years, for the Socialist Workers Party.Shameless, unadulterated bullshit.<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>
Vote Trump in swing states. Vote Jill everywhere else.
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www.unz.com
Herewith, a dissent. Whatever happens Tuesday, Trump has made history and has forever changed American politics.Though a novice in politics, he captured the Party of Lincoln with the largest turnout of primary voters ever, and he has inflicted wounds on the nation's ruling class from which it may not soon recover.
Bush I and II, Mitt Romney, the neocons and the GOP commentariat all denounced Trump as morally and temperamentally unfit. Yet, seven of eight Republicans are voting for Trump, and he drew the largest and most enthusiastic crowds of any GOP nominee.
Not only did he rout the Republican elites, he ash-canned their agenda and repudiated the wars into which they plunged the country.
Trump did not create the forces that propelled his candidacy. But he recognized them, tapped into them, and unleashed a gusher of nationalism and populism that will not soon dissipate.
Whatever happens Tuesday, there is no going back now.
How could the Republican establishment advance anew the trade and immigration policies that their base has so thunderously rejected?
How can the GOP establishment credibly claim to speak for a party that spent the last year cheering a candidate who repudiated the last two Republican presidents and the last two Republican nominees?
Do mainstream Republicans think that should Trump lose a Bush Restoration lies ahead? The dynasty is as dead as the Romanovs.
The media, whose reputation has sunk to Congressional depths, has also suffered a blow to its credibility.
Its hatred of Trump has been almost manic, and WikiLeaks revelations of the collusion between major media and Clintonites have convinced skeptics that the system is rigged and the referees of democracy are in the tank.
But it is the national establishment that has suffered most. The Trump candidacy exposed what seems an unbridgeable gulf between this political class and the nation in whose name it purports to speak.
Consider the litany of horrors it has charged Trump with.
He said John McCain was no hero, that some Mexican illegals are "rapists." He mocked a handicapped reporter. He called some women "pigs." He wants a temporary ban to Muslim immigration. He fought with a Gold Star mother and father. He once engaged in "fat-shaming" a Miss Universe, calling her "Miss Piggy," and telling her to stay out of Burger King. He allegedly made crude advances on a dozen women and starred in the "Access Hollywood" tape with Billy Bush.
While such "gaffes" are normally fatal for candidates, Trump's followers stood by him through them all.
Why? asks an alarmed establishment. Why, in spite of all this, did Trump's support endure? Why did the American people not react as they once would have? Why do these accusations not have the bite they once did?
Answer. We are another country now, an us-or-them country.
Middle America believes the establishment is not looking out for the nation but for retention of its power. And in attacking Trump it is not upholding some objective moral standard but seeking to destroy a leader who represents a grave threat to that power.
Trump's followers see an American Spring as crucial, and they are not going to let past boorish behavior cause them to abandon the last best chance to preserve the country they grew up in.
These are the Middle American Radicals, the MARs of whom my late friend Sam Francis wrote.
They recoil from the future the elites have mapped out for them and, realizing the stakes, will overlook the faults and failings of a candidate who holds out the real promise of avoiding that future.
They believe Trump alone will secure the borders and rid us of a trade regime that has led to the loss of 70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs since NAFTA. They believe Trump is the best hope for keeping us out of the wars the Beltway think tanks are already planning for the sons of the "deplorables" to fight.
Moreover, they see the establishment as the quintessence of hypocrisy. Trump is instructed to stop using such toxic phrases as "America First" and "Make America Great Again" by elites...
... ... ...
While a Trump victory would create the possibility of a coalition of conservatives, populists, patriots and nationalists governing America, should he lose, America's future appears disunited and grim.
But, would the followers of Donald Trump, whom Hillary Clinton has called "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic … bigots," to the cheers of her media retainers, unite behind her should she win?
No. Win or lose, as Sen. Edward Kennedy said at the Democratic Convention of 1980, "The work goes on, the cause endures."
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of the new book "The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority."
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Nov 07, 2016 | www.globalresearch.ca
After all, Clinton is not going to make it into the Oval Office unless she can secure the votes of those who backed the far-more progressive Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries.Clinton's camp have wielded various sticks to beat these voters into submission. Not least they have claimed that a refusal to vote for Clinton is an indication of one's misogyny . But it has not been an easy task. Actor Susan Sarandon, for example, has stated that she is not going to "vote with my vagina". As she notes, if the issue is simply about proving one is not anti-women, there is a much worthier candidate for president who also happens to be female: Jill Stein, of the Green Party.
Sarandon, who supported Sanders in the primaries, spoke for a vast swath of voters excluded by the two-party system when she told BBC Newsnight:
I am worried about the wars, I am worried about Syria, I am worried about all of these things that actually exist. TTP [Trans-Pacific Partnership] and I'm worried about fracking. I'm worrying about the environment. No matter who gets in they don't address these things because money has taken over our system.
Given that both Donald Trump and Clinton represent big money – and big money only – Clinton's supporters have been forced to find another stick. And that has been the "lesser evil" argument. Clinton may be bad, but Trump would be far worse. Voting for a non-evil candidate like Jill Stein – who has no hope of winning – would split the progressive camp and ensure Trump, the more evil candidate, triumphs. Therefore, there is a moral obligation on progressive voters to back Clinton, however bad her track record as a senator and as secretary of state.
There is nothing new about this argument. It had been around for decades, and has been corralling progressives into voting for Democratic presidents who have still advanced US neoconservative policy goals abroad and neoliberal ones at home.
America's pseudo-democracy
So is it true that Clinton is the lesser-evil candidate? To answer that question, we need to examine those "policy differences" with Trump.
On the negative side, Trump's platform poses a genuine threat to civil liberties. His bigoted, "blame the immigrants" style of politics will harm many families in the US in very tangible ways. Even if the inertia of the political system reins in his worst excesses, as is almost certain, his inflammatory rhetoric is sure to damage the façade of democratic discourse in the US – a development not to be dismissed lightly. Americans may be living in a pseudo-democracy, one run more like a plutocracy, but destroying the politics of respect, and civil discourse, could quickly result in the normalisation of political violence and intimidation.
On the plus side, Trump is an isolationist, with little appetite for foreign entanglements. Again, the Washington policy elites may force him to engage abroad in ways he would prefer not to, but his instincts to limit the projection of US military power on the international stage are likely to be an overall good for the world's population outside the US. Any diminishment of US imperialism is going to have real practical benefits for billions of people around the globe. His refusal to demonise Vladimir Putin, for example, may be significant enough to halt the gradual slide towards a nuclear confrontation with Russia, either in Ukraine or in the Middle East.
Clinton is the mirror image of Trump. Domestically, she largely abides by the rules of civil politics – not least because respectful discourse benefits her as the candidate with plenty of political experience. The US is likely to be a more stable, more predictable place under a Clinton presidency, even as the plutocratic elite entrenches its power and the wealth gap grows relentlessly.
Abroad, however, the picture looks worse under Clinton. She has been an enthusiastic supporter of all the many recent wars of aggression launched by the US, some declared and some covert. Personally, as secretary of state, she helped engineer the overthrow of Col Muammar Gaddafi. That policy led to an outcome – one that was entirely foreseeable – of Libya's reinvention as a failed state, with jihadists of every stripe sucked into the resulting vacuum. Large parts of Gadaffi's arsenal followed the jihadists as they exported their struggles across the Middle East, creating more bloodshed and heightening the refugee crisis. Now Clinton wants to intensify US involvement in Syria, including by imposing a no-fly zone – or rather, a US and allies-only fly zone – that would thrust the US into a direct confrontation with another nuclear-armed power, Russia.
In the cost-benefit calculus of who to vote for in a two-party contest, the answer seems to be: vote for Clinton if you are interested only in what happens in the narrow sphere of US domestic politics (assuming Clinton does not push the US into a nuclear war); while if you are a global citizen worried about the future of the planet, Trump may be the marginally better of two terribly evil choices. (Neither, of course, cares a jot about the most pressing problem facing mankind: runaway climate change.)
So even on the extremely blinkered logic of Clinton's supporters, Clinton might not be the winner in a lesser-evil presidential contest.
Mounting disillusion
But there is a second, more important reason to reject the lesser-evil argument as grounds for voting for Clinton.
Trump's popularity is a direct consequence of several decades of American progressives voting for the lesser-evil candidate. Most Americans have never heard of Jill Stein, or the other three candidates who are not running on behalf of the Republican and Democratic parties. These candidates have received no mainstream media coverage – or the chance to appear in the candidate debates – because their share of the vote is so minuscule. It remains minuscule precisely because progressives have spent decades voting for the lesser-evil candidate. And nothing is going to change so long as progressives keep responding to the electoral dog-whistle that they have to keep the Republican candidate out at all costs, even at the price of their own consciences.
Growing numbers of Americans understand that their country was "stolen from them", to use a popular slogan. They sense that the US no longer even aspires to its founding ideals, that it has become a society run for the exclusive benefit of a tiny wealthy elite. Many are looking for someone to articulate their frustration, their powerlessness, their hopelessness.
Two opposed antidotes for the mounting disillusionment with "normal politics" emerged during the presidential race: a progressive one, in the form of Sanders, who suggested he was ready to hold the plutocrats to account; and a populist one, in the form of Trump, determined to deflect anger away from the plutocrats towards easy targets like immigrants. As we now know from Wikileaks' release of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's emails, the Democats worked hard to rig their own primaries to make sure the progressive option, Sanders, was eliminated. The Republicans, by contrast, were overwhelmed by the insurrection within their own party.
The wave of disaffection Sanders and Trump have been riding is not going away. In fact, a President Clinton, the embodiment of the self-serving, self-aggrandising politics of the plutocrats, will only fuel the disenchantment. The fixing of the Democratic primaries did not strengthen Clinton's moral authority, it fuelled the kind of doubts about the system that bolster Trump. Trump's accusations of a corrupt elite and a rigged political and media system are not merely figments of his imagination; they are rooted in the realities of US politics.
Trump, however, is not the man to offer solutions. His interests are too close aligned to those of the plutocrats for him to make meaningful changes.
Trump may lose this time, but someone like him will do better next time – unless ordinary Americans are exposed to a different kind of politician, one who can articulate progressive, rather regressive, remedies for the necrosis that is rotting the US body politic. Sanders began that process, but a progressive challenge to "politics as normal" has to be sustained and extended if Trump and his ilk are not to triumph eventually.
The battle cannot be delayed another few years, on the basis that one day a genuinely non-evil candidate will emerge from nowhere to fix this rotten system. It won't happen of its own. Unless progressive Americans show they are prepared to vote out of conviction, not out of necessity, the Democratic party will never have to take account of their views. It will keep throwing up leaders – in different colours and different sexes – to front the tiny elite that runs the US and seeks to rule the world.
It is time to say no – loudly – to Clinton, whether she is the slightly lesser-evil candidate or not. The original source of this article is Jonathan Cook Blog Copyright © Jonathan Cook , Jonathan Cook Blog , 2016
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Nov 07, 2016 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
The Trail
Best pro-Trump piece I've seen: "The GOP's 'Ungrateful Bastard' Caucus" [ American Greatness ].
Best pro-Clinton piece remains: "Vote for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger: It's Important" [ Common Dreams ].
The best reasons I can think of to vote for each candidate (as opposed to against the other candidates). In no particular order:
Trump: A realist foreign policy Clinton: More of the same Stein: Break the two-party duopoloy Johnson: Sanity on marijuna legalization
These reasons are, of course, entirely incommensurate.
"The American Conservative Presidential Symposium" [ The American Conservative ]. Michael Tracey: "Trump might be better than Hillary on foreign policy (my top issue), but he's far too volatile to conclude that with any certainty, and he may well end up being catastrophically worse. The Clintons' outrageous stoking of a war fervor over Russia is quite simply depraved and should disqualify them from reentering the White House…. Democrats deserve punishment for nominating a candidate with such severe legal problems, stifling a genuine populist insurgent in the most craven possible fashion (I supported Bernie Sanders but find his recent hectoring pro-Clinton conduct highly off-putting). Their shambolic, 'rigged' primary process can't be countenanced, nor can the 2016 electoral debacle as a whole, so I'll do my small part in rejecting this horror show by declining to vote."
Realignment
"America's Ruling Elite Has Failed and Deserves to Be Fired" [ Of Two Minds ]. "The last failed remnants of the state-cartel hierarchies left over from World War II must implode before we can move forward. Healthcare, defense, pharmaceuticals, higher education, the mainstream media and the systems of governance must all decay to the point that no one can be protected from the destructive consequences of their failure, and no paychecks can be issued by these failed systems." Tellingly, the author omits the FIRE sector. So I would say their definition of elite is odd.
"[E]ducation levels are a more significant factor this year. Obama won a majority of those with a high school diploma (or less) in 2012, while Romney won college-educated voters. This year the numbers are reversed. Among white voters with only a high school education, Trump leads by over 25 points. Among whites with a college degree, Clinton leads by about 10 percent. This is the first time since serious polling began in 1952 that this has happened [ RealClearPoltiics ]. And when I ask myself who sent the United States heading toward Third World status, it's not those without college degrees. In fact, it's Clinton's base.
"The Last Gasp of the American Dream" [ The Archdruid Report ].
[M]illions of Americans trudge through a bleak round of layoffs, wage cuts, part-time jobs at minimal pay, and system-wide dysfunction. The crisis hasn't hit yet, but those members of the political class who think that the people who used to be rock-solid American patriots will turn out en masse to keep today's apparatchiks secure in their comfortable lifestyles have, as the saying goes, another think coming. Nor is it irrelevant that most of the enlisted personnel in the armed forces, who are the US government's ultimate bulwark against popular unrest, come from the very classes that have lost faith most drastically in the American system. The one significant difference between the Soviet case and the American one at this stage of the game is that Soviet citizens had no choice but to accept the leaders the Communist Party of the USSR foisted off on them, from Brezhnev to Andropov to Chernenko to Gorbachev, until the system collapsed of its own weight…
If George W. Bush was our Leonid Brezhnev, as I'd suggest, and Barack Obama is our Yuri Andropov, Hillary Clinton is running for the position of Konstantin Chernenko; her running mate Tim Kaine, in turn, is waiting in the wings as a suitably idealistic and clueless Mikhail Gorbachev, under whom the whole shebang can promptly go to bits. While I don't seriously expect the trajectory of the United States to parallel that of the Soviet Union anything like as precisely as this satiric metaphor would suggest, the basic pattern of cascading dysfunction ending in political collapse is quite a common thing in history, and a galaxy of parallels suggests that the same thing could very easily happen here within the next decade or so. The serene conviction among the political class and their affluent hangers-on that nothing of the sort could possibly take place is just another factor making it more likely.
"Why Trump Is Different-and Must Be Repelled" [Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker ].
For the past months, and into this final week, as for much of the past year, many New Yorkers have been in a position that recalls parents with a colicky baby: you put the baby down at last, it seems safely asleep, grateful and unbelievably exhausted you return to bed-only to hear the small tell-tale cough or sob that guarantees another crying jag is on the way. The parents in this case, to fill in the metaphorical blanks, are liberal-minded folk; the baby's cries are any indicators that Donald Trump may not be out of the race for President-as he seemed to be even as recently as last week-and may actually have a real chance at being elected. Disbelief crowds exhaustion: this can't be happening. If the colicky baby is a metaphor too sweet for so infantile a figure as the orange menace, then let us think instead, perhaps, of the killer in a teen horror movie of the vintage kind: every time Freddy seemed dispatched and buried, there he was leaping up again, as the teens caught their breath and returned, too soon, to their teendom.
Of course, Gopnik - who should really stick to writing sweetly atmospheric pieces about Paris - is both passive-aggressive and infuriatingly smug. To "fill in the metaphorical blanks," but for realz, both the "colicky baby" and the teen horror movie villain are infantilized and displaced versions of a working class Other: The Trump voter that Eurostar-rider Gopnik hates and fears, because he's afraid they're going to come and kill him and take his stuff. In short, he has the guilty conscience of a classic liberal.
Democrat Email Hairball
Our Famously Free Press"Dow surges 300 points as FBI clears Clinton on eve of election" [ USA Today ]. Hmm. Insiders go to HappyVille!
"Vox Scams Readers Into Thinking Prescient World Series Tweet Was A Scam [Update]" [ DeadSpin ].
Guillotine Watch
"Too Smug to Jail" [Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone ]. "As we reach the close of an election season marked by anger toward the unaccountable rich, The Economist has chimed in with a defense of the beleaguered white-collar criminal."
[T]his is the crucial passage:
"Most corporate crime is the result of collective action rather than individual wrongdoing-long chains of command that send (often half-understood) instructions, or corporate cultures that encourage individuals to take risky actions. The authorities have rightly adjusted to this reality by increasingly prosecuting companies rather than going after individual miscreants."
Yikes! This extraordinary argument is cousin to the Lieutenant Calley defense , i.e., that soldiers bear no responsibility for crimes they were ordered to execute. The Economist here would have you believe that there's no such thing as an individual crime in a corporate context.
Class Warfare
On neoliberalism [Matt Stoller, Facebook , via Atrios ].
Neoliberalism is a kind of statecraft. It means organizing state policies by making them appear as if they are the consequences of depoliticized financial markets.
It involves moving power from public institutions to private institutions, and allowing governance to happen through concentrated financial power. Actual open markets for goods and services tend to disappear in neoliberal societies.
Financial markets flourish, real markets morph into mass distribution middlemen like Walmart or Amazon.
Neoliberalism is not faith in free markets. Neoliberalism is not free market capitalism. Neoliberalism is a specific form of statecraft that uses financial markets as a veil to disguise governing policies.
What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed. Stoller is paraphrasing his review of Greta Krippner's Capitalizing on Crisis , which sounds well worth a read.
"Uncovering Credit Disparities among Low- and Moderate-Income Areas" [ Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis ]. "Eggleston found that LMI [lower abd middle-income] neighborhoods with relatively better credit tend to be in metros with a larger percentage of white residents, and they are typically found in the East, West and parts of the upper Midwest. They also tend to be in metros that have lower poverty rates."
HopeLB November 7, 2016 at 4:15 pmPavel November 7, 2016 at 3:03 pmLook at reddit r/politics. Did Hillary/Brock stop paying to downvote all anti-Hill posts/comments? Reaction to the Daily Beast telling readers "YOU MUST VOTE HILLARY" was at 11,000. Maybe, Hillary and Co are trying to get a handle on real voter sentiment?
Or they don't care now that it is in the bag.Norm November 7, 2016 at 3:31 pmLOL I was going to post (well, I guess I am doing so) that the finger I am counting down on is my middle finger, which I shall extend to the DNC, the RNC, the MSM, and the rest of the corrupt US oligarchy that brought us here. Especially the MSM - and note of course that it was Bill Clinton who deregulated the media so it went from one hundred or so to the SIX corporate behemoths that control 90%+ of the news that the average American consumes.
FU!
The only consolation is that clearly a Dem or Repub president doesn't really matter, given the corporatocracy (or oligarchy, take your pick). So the bonus this year is that Drump destroyed the Bush dynasty and most of the RNC. And Clinton has burnt all her bridges and allies and the liberal MSM in getting to her (assumed) victory.
My humble advice for tomorrow: have a case of beer, wine, whiskey, or green tea at hand, relax, play some good music, ignore the MSM, and remember whatever happens the world will go on and one US president or another will screw the serfs domestically and bomb Middle Eastern countries.
OIFVet November 7, 2016 at 5:05 pmUnless Hillary and the gung-ho neocons decide that we really should see just how far Putin can be pushed.
frosty zoom November 7, 2016 at 2:58 pmOh yeah, I will extend my own middle finger right back at them tomorrow. Voting for Stein will at least give me the inner peace and comfort of knowing that I did not vote for the "lesser evil" represented by Madame Secretary. I don't care which one wins, all I know is that the rest of us in the 90% will be screwed either way. But I will settle down in the evening, have a cuppa, and hope that TV will provide me with some schadenfreude.
RabidGandhi November 7, 2016 at 5:20 pmmust be a glitch in putin's ipad.
Kim Kaufman November 7, 2016 at 6:28 pmHe even changed all the clocks Saturday night. Is nothing sacred?
Ulysses November 7, 2016 at 2:59 pmA repost from a while ago that I saved and finally read over the weekend: Everything Is Broken https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1#.voxbs0841
phred November 7, 2016 at 3:53 pmThanks indeed!
I apologize if these concluding thoughts on an exhausting electoral season, by Chris Hedges, have already been posted:
"We cannot betray the ideal of a popular democracy by pretending this contrived political theater is free or fair or democratic. We cannot play their game. We cannot play by their rules. Our job is not to accommodate the corporate state….
The state seeks to control us through fear, propaganda, wholesale surveillance and violence. [This] is the only form of social control it has left. The lie of neoliberalism has been exposed. Its credibility has imploded. The moment we cease being afraid, the moment we use our collective strength as I saw in Eastern Europe in 1989 to make the rulers afraid of us, is the moment of the system's downfall.
Go into the voting booth on Tuesday. Do not be afraid. Vote with your conscience."
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/defying_the_politics_of_fear_20161106
BecauseTradition November 7, 2016 at 6:29 pmThank you for that link. I particularly liked the last sentences of Hedges' piece:
"I do not, in the end, fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists."
Yep.
cocomaan November 7, 2016 at 3:38 pmSounds too much like the Demos fighting for the people but never winning. Also a bit narcissistic. And is Hedges a foe of, say, the government insurance of privately created deposits – a fascist invention if ever there was?
Knifecatcher November 7, 2016 at 4:10 pmThanks for Correcting the Record! Glad that we can lump anyone who questions your narrative into four neat categories. There's no possible way someone could have an original thought.
Carolinian November 7, 2016 at 2:48 pmLifted verbatim from Deadspin. You'd think CTR could write their own propaganda rather than plagiarizing from a crappy sportswriter.
Waldenpond November 7, 2016 at 5:16 pmGopnik/infuriatingly smug….lotta that going around. You hate what you fear?
Code Name D November 7, 2016 at 4:45 pmYou only need to buy a plane etc. to hand out as favors, buy 4 or 5 dozen media personalities at mainstream outlets (a network is a must), get your sycophants in elections offices all over the country to purge your rival's voters and raise a billion dollars. Easy peasy.
nippersdad November 7, 2016 at 2:56 pmYour assuming we don't get about a dozen Florida Hanging-chad scandals. If Trump wins the wrong states – this will land in court, and all end in tears.
Ulysses November 7, 2016 at 3:04 pmThat Reed column, "Vote for the lying neoliberal warmonger; it's important, has always struck me badly. His point that those who voted for a Democrat for President since '92 have done as badly or worse than they would in voting for Clinton is just false. No one in my memory has so slavishly supported finance capital and foreign wars. No one has made going to war with China, Russia or Iran a central plank in their candidacy.
I, personally, can't get over that. Republicans will do what they will do, it is not my job to support someone who makes for a better Republican than they can come up with themselves.
nycTerrierist November 7, 2016 at 5:28 pm"It is not my job to support someone who makes for a better Republican than they can come up with themselves."
Very well said!!
Escher November 7, 2016 at 7:30 pm+1
I will never again vote for the 'lesser of two evils'. Did it once for Obama (against Sarah Palin). Never again. It just encourages more crapification.
aab November 7, 2016 at 7:53 pmI've read exactly one compelling argument for voting Hillary, by Jim Kunstler, who thinks it best if the crew responsible for the mess is still holding the bag when things really go south.
I believe it was linked here when published.
Foppe November 7, 2016 at 3:14 pmI'd be more inclined to value that possibility if it wasn't clear that the Executive Branch can now launch wars of choice at will. I have a draft age daughter.
Pat November 7, 2016 at 3:19 pmIt's not a reference to Doing your Bit turning in family/friends/neighbors/coworkers who you "know" to be abusing the system, and thus Causing the Problem??
OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL November 7, 2016 at 4:27 pmFirst violence is not the answer. Still that does make one want to find a way to march the people who came up with that along with the top management of Cigna to the stocks for some quality communing time with their customers. That there should also be a huge pile of rotten produce near the stocks would be merely coincidence.
jrs November 7, 2016 at 3:40 pmLOL and tomorrow a majority of Americans will vote back in the crowd that brought this down upon them. Wait til you see what they are gearing up to do to SocSec.
Maybe it's a deep-seated Calvinist/Protestant self-loathing? Catholic self-flaggelation? Stockholm Syndrome?
Joe Bageant wrote about the curious phenomenon of the Republican base voting year in and year out for candidates who acted in direct opposition to their own economic interests…maybe that's both "sides" of politics now?
Jeremy Grimm November 7, 2016 at 3:48 pmI wish I had a benefit package :( Even a crappy one! They are throwing us on to some kind of exchange program this year. Things go from bad to worse …
Knifecatcher November 7, 2016 at 3:58 pmAn off-the-wall question - is your pseudonym related to Henrich Boll's story "Der Mann mit den Messern"?
Oregoncharles November 7, 2016 at 4:10 pmHa! Nope. Bought a house in 2009 and thought it was appropriate, and have been using it on finance / political forums ever since. Worked out OK for us, though.
Jeremy Grimm November 7, 2016 at 6:30 pmthat was good timing. We bought a duplex then, have done very well on it. A lot of work, though.
frosty zoom November 7, 2016 at 3:07 pmSo you don't like to throw a knife over your head and catch it with a board over your head at the last minute?
frosty zoom November 7, 2016 at 3:08 pmnot only branding, but leeching as well.
Oregoncharles November 7, 2016 at 3:43 pmin response to "Knifecatcher".
John k November 7, 2016 at 3:45 pm" But lots of other states use electronic machines in some capacity" [Wired]. "
Much depends on exactly how. For an example, Oregon uses paper ballots marked by the voter, but, at least in my county, electronic counters. But the paper ballots are audited and stored for years, so it's easy to check up. Everything happens at the courthouse, so there's no transmission from precincts, and transmission to the SOS is probably in person by phone, followed up by email.
I'm confident in this system, not least because Oregon is a "clean" state. One county official has been caught cheating by filling in unvoted lines for Republicans, but went to jail. I can think of other ways for insiders to cheat, but it would be dangerous and pretty easy to catch.
I'm not concerned about the electronic counters as long as they aren't connected to the internet – no reason for them to be – and the results are properly audited, the biggest if. I wonder a bit about very small rural counties, where everybody knows everybody else's business and there isn't much money for safeguards.
In any case, from a national point of view Oregon's results are not in doubt. Now I have to do some campaign work for our Ranked Choice Voting initiative, and I look forward to finding out how it did in Maine.
Jeremy Grimm November 7, 2016 at 3:55 pmTrump had big mo, maybe until yesterday…
Today's Ibd puts T ahead by 2, best for some time… Plus generally favorable LATimes…
And blacks not turning out nearly as 08/12.
And Brexit and MI primary polls were far off because ungrateful deplorables.
Regardless, FL is must win for T. If he gets that, then the following swings might fall into place:
OH, NV, NC, IA, NM, (270), and maybe NH bonus.
If he misses FL he would need PA plus CO, likely hopeless.I guess we deserve what we've got here… Vastly corrupt warmonger running for Obomber's third term vs loose racist/sexist cannon, albeit apparently the latter likes Putin and avoidsWWIII. Does seem harsh.
JSM November 7, 2016 at 4:01 pmAs I read the Archdruid's essay I could not but agree with everything he said about the soon past election.
Though I usually read him for how to deal with what comes after.
nobody November 7, 2016 at 4:03 pmRe: Vox Scams Readers Into Thinking Prescient World Series Tweet Was A Scam [Update]
Time to correct the correction: 'This story was not up to our standards, and we deeply regret the error.'
What standards?
LT November 7, 2016 at 4:10 pmRegarding "Best pro-Trump piece I've seen," this one is better:
" Donald Trump and Empire: An Assessment ," by Max Forte.
Ché Pasa November 7, 2016 at 4:17 pmDow surge…
Of course, if Hillary wins the bubble wins. Everyone with a 401k thinks they hit a triple, but they were walked to third. They won't make it to "home" (comfy retirement).
Meanwhile, Trump is of the 80s heyday of corporate raids…letting it fall and buying up cheap. Wall St knows.
Hillary wins – ride the bubble and pray you know when to dump (and you can't trust the MSM info – otherwise suckers would have seen 2008 coming).
Trump wins – being liquid rules the day.
Tvc15 November 7, 2016 at 5:56 pmThe election will continue until the correct result is obtained.
That could happen tomorrow; it could just as well drag into January if the EC is tied or, say, the "Russians" interfere and we have to have a cyberwar or something. Wouldn't it be interesting if the House of Rs had to pick the prez? Maybe if the Supremes hadn't lawlessly intervened in the 2000 election, we wouldn't be in this pickle now. But they did. And we are.
The "correct result" one assumes is Hillary; one has assumed so since this morbid campaign began. As appealing as Bernie could be at times, there was no chance he would be allowed to stand as the Democratic nominee. And if the indications of chicanery are correct, he was actively prevented from becoming the nominee regardless of the "vote."
At no time did those who rule us ever consider Trump for the Big Chair. He's just too open and uncouth, don'tchaknow. Can't have that. Might give the game away. But he's a sop to the so-called populists, and man does he run a masterful con. All the slick and perfumed members of his class only wish they had his skill at suckering the rubes. Whoa. Dude.
Meanwhile, it's good to learn that there can be no corruption unless its name is Clinton (er, correction: "Clintoon") or can be linked somehow, if only tangentially, to the Clintoon Crime Syndicate, or it arises politically from the Democratic (er, correction: "Democrat") Party which is the ultimate source of all corruption, even that of the Clintoons.
Nothing the Democrat Party or the Clintoons do is defensible; defenses for Trump, on the other hand, well. "It's just business." Or my favorite: "At least he hasn't killed anybody (sotto voce: yet… that we know of ") So let's give him a chance!
Our Rulers are close to panicking because no matter who is ultimately selected, they fear there will be blood in the streets, and the unrest might get close to their compounds, lead to unpleasantness in their high-rises, interfere, perhaps, with some of their looting and destruction for pleasure.
This election has, for once, discommoded the comfortable.
I voted for Stein, the completely incorrect candidate, though I toyed with leaving the topline blank. Many people I know did that. But no, some of us feel the need to show solidarity with our leftish comrades. So few though, in the end.
We'll get through this, but it'll get uglier.
marym November 7, 2016 at 6:01 pmI'm finally coming to the conclusion I'll vote for Stein too for a similar reason. Have thought about voting the following ways ranked by likelihood.
Leave the top of the ticket blank – not wanting to legitimize the charade
Write-in Stein
Write-in Bernie
Trump – if "they" hate him so much…We are a 3 write-in family in Maine.
Spouse, Bernie
19 yr old male, Obama, I think absurist humor, but not certain.Tvc15 November 7, 2016 at 6:54 pmAccording to her website Stein is on the ballot in Maine.
http://www.jill2016.com/ballot_accessmarym November 7, 2016 at 7:11 pmThanks, I'll find out tomorrow. My spouse received an absentee ballot and said Stein wasn't listed. Maybe she missed her.
curlydan November 7, 2016 at 5:58 pmAlso, if people are writing in a candidate to make a statement or as an act of personal conscience, that's their choice, but if they want the vote counted the rules vary by state. In most states, including Maine, the candidate has to file paperwork.
cocomaan November 7, 2016 at 4:22 pmWhat's your prediction of how many votes Stein will get nationwide? The Wiki god of knowledge says she got 470K in 2012. I'm going to say 3M in 2016 or about 2.5%.
timbers November 7, 2016 at 4:28 pmInteresting line from the Gopnik article:
One need only track the past month's series of outrages, each quickly receding into the distance, to recall that he has done not one but almost innumerable things that in any previous election would have been, quaint word, "disqualifying."
I don't know if it would ever occur to Gopnik, but perhaps people are tired of idiotic gaffes and meaningless scandals sinking candidates. Maybe, for a sizable portion of the country, the sex scandal has been overused as some kind of indicator for someone's ability to govern, or, even though Gopnik doesn't understand this, it isn't a reflection on their ability to speak about policies that mean something to them.
Talking with Trump supporters I know, they are all very much influenced by: 1) his embracing of nationalism, 2) rejection of trade deals, 3) ideas about reforming government finance. Of course, their distrust for Hillary is just as strong.
I haven't met any trump supporters saying, "Gee, I really think his misogyny lets me free my own inherent sexism." But then again, when identity politics is what you rely on to make your vote, anyone opposed to your candidate is part of a vast linked chain of ignorant brains and invisible connections that only they can see or appreciate.
Also loved his closing line:
For, as Shakespeare would have grasped at once, there is no explaining Trump.
Isn't that your job, Adam? Put your keyboard down if you're unable to do it and spare us the columns.
hamstak November 7, 2016 at 5:36 pmThe slightest bit of self-discipline on Trump's part, and Clinton is suddenly in the race of her life. Shows her extreme weakness as a candidate, and the decadence of the Democrat nomenklatura that forced her nomination through, not to mention the decadence of the political class…
If Clinton wins by any margin that doesn't keep her up all night, will not be surprised if she and Team Blue will act as if this is the most awesome-est triumph ever because they are the most awesome-est ever. First women first couple both being Presidents etc etc. They don't seem to have any sense of just how weak and disliked she/they are, and why. They will arrogantly proceed to govern as if they received a powerful mandate and not give an inch anywhere on policy, confident that the methods they used to get elected will work again in 4 years. It will be their way or the highway.
The increased volatility you predict makes sense.
GMoore November 7, 2016 at 5:39 pmA cynic might also view another first in this election: the first time that a "charitable" foundation has been elected to the office! But perhaps I am being somewhat unfair in questioning the esteemed institution's charity, as it has indeed been charitable towards some.
hreik November 7, 2016 at 7:30 pmTaxable Donations to the Clinton Foundation could pay off the national debt – says Charles Ortel, should a Trump administration request a grand jury to assess the many many deficiencies and out and out crimes of that sham charity.
That is the spit and glue that binds the never Trump coalition. There are billions and billions at stake. Wall St, foreign governments, world leaders and the Gates Foundation, Bezos, Slim, Geithner, Paulson - all the big boys. Ortel does a splendid job on you tube explaining how strict the rules are for charitable foundations.
The FBI has the goods on the Clinton's and their phony baloney "foundation".
All they need is a courageous and honest Atty General – state or federal – willing to literally risk life, limb, children, dogs, cats and extended family members should they file charges on the Royals and fail.
"The onus is on the charity" – says Ortel, to prove their innocence, once charges are filed. And the Clinton Foundation has never EVER filed the proper paper work to do ANY of their activities. AGAIN, the rules state you may not raise money for AIDS, unless your charter was filed to do so. the Clintons have never filed the necessary paperwork. There is a 19 page expose on their failure to file or provide the necessary forms.
Hundreds of billions in taxable penalties and interest will be due, should Trump prevail and ask for a grand jury. He doesn't have to threaten them. THEY KNOW
When you see George Will, LInsay Graham, Bill Kristol and the Bush crime family pulling out all the stops to end this revolution – it's because of EXPOSURE.
The Clinton Foundation is the GOLD MINE. Watch and listen.
Waldenpond November 7, 2016 at 7:51 pmthank you thank you thank you
John Merryman November 7, 2016 at 4:56 pmMedia will call states early. They will have to call CA. Our numbers take too long to count.
Jim Haygood November 7, 2016 at 5:02 pmLooking at the market today, the adage; "Buy the rumor, sell the news," comes to mind.
Pat November 7, 2016 at 5:08 pmIt's over …
Hillary Clinton's planned celebratory election night fireworks display over the Hudson River has been canceled, it was revealed Monday.
"They do have a permit for fireworks, but at this point we believe the fireworks is canceled," NYPD chief of intelligence Tommy Galati said at a city press conference on Election Day security with Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner James O'Neill.
When asked by a reporter why the fireworks were canceled, Galati responded, "I cannot tell you that."
Clinton was planning aerial detonations for her potential victory that would last for two minutes starting as early at 9:30 p.m. - a half-hour after the polls close in New York.
http://nypost.com/2016/11/07/clinton-calls-off-election-night-fireworks/
Since when does the chief of intelligence get involved in a fireworks permit?
UserFriendly November 7, 2016 at 5:35 pmNew York City is going to be a mess tomorrow. I do see that Clinton has messed up Philadelphia.
Unfortunately after tomorrow there will just be a different form of awful….no matter who wins.
Waldenpond November 7, 2016 at 5:45 pmSince Latino Turnout has been up and AA down Trumps best shot is hoping that the Philly transit strike and Rain in Detroit and most of PA on tuesday suppress less enthusiastic Clinton voters. Both have low early voting. Then he has to cross his fingers for NC and NH.
http://www.270towin.com/maps/EXyOoUserFriendly November 7, 2016 at 5:56 pmTransit strike is over as reported in links.
UserFriendly November 7, 2016 at 5:52 pmcrud. Well maybe the rainstorm will blow in a little sooner then it is predicted, even then it will only hit Pittsburgh though. But it will hit Detroit all day.
UserFriendly November 7, 2016 at 6:05 pmOtherwise he needs to hold FL. Then it comes down to PA, NC, NV, and NH.
http://www.270towin.com/maps/DOgzkHe can lose PA and win the rest,
http://www.270towin.com/maps/kmP8JOr he can win PA and any 1 other and win (NH would be a tie)
http://www.270towin.com/maps/Ne9dpUserFriendly November 7, 2016 at 6:36 pmBasically he needs either PA & Michigan or FL. Michigan is a stretch, even with the rain, and PA is a long shot without the strike. So it looks like his best hope is what I predicted ages ago.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/09/thanks-for-vacation-coverage.html#comment-2667883ewmayer November 7, 2016 at 5:41 pmWe'll know at 7pm, unless he wins both FL and NH at 7 my money is on him going down.
Dave November 7, 2016 at 6:02 pmGallup US Consumer Spending Measure, October 2016: " In October, Americans' daily self-reports of spending averaged $93, similar to September's $91 average. However, it is among the highest for the month of October in the survey's nine-year trend" [Econoday] - Was it too much to hope for an economists-trying-to-sound-smart subtitle along the lines of "Economists cite effect of Halloween falling in October this year" on this?
(And I wonder how that yuuge $2 rise compares to the error bars on the survey. Also whether any portion can be attributed to all those new improved health insurance rates showering their blessings on the country.)
Karl Kolchack November 7, 2016 at 6:29 pmWhat about the idea that if we elect Trump, Americans' anger will be diffused and most people will be happy?
If Clinton gets it, everyone, except her financiers will be unhappy, sooner or later.Four years of Hillary, continuing economic stagnation and more wars may usher in and elect a candidate in 2020 who will make Trump look like a meek-mannered gentleman.
Will it really be worth it to the elite to elect Hillary and end up having to live behind locked gates and only venture out in public with a cadre of bodyguards? Will the wealthy see their Teslas and luxury cars stoned and trashed when they park them in public?
Or, should they just live with Trump and like it? If I were an elite, I'd vote for Trump for that very reason.
Yves Smith November 7, 2016 at 7:54 pmElecting Trump will not defuse the anger–it will just mean that for a little while at least the half of the population who owns most of the guns will be happier. That will give us a year or so until they realize that he was never serious about helping them, and lacks the political skills or even attention span to do so. By 2018, we'd be right back to the starting point–just in time to start the whole stupid cycle all over again.
John Steinbach November 7, 2016 at 6:51 pmNo, a lot of things would change. Clinton winning would be seen as validation of the status quo. Trump winning would be destabilizing. To pretend that the two outcomes are the same is wrongheaded.
Trump winning would break the hold of the Clintons on the Democratic party, and since they've made the party overly concerned with the Presidency, at the expense of building a bench or capturing down-ticket races (all down the list, Congress, governorships, important state level posts), the damage to the party would be profound. They were already expected to lose the Senate in 2018 even if they recover it tomorrow.
Trump winning would also throw a wrench into the Republicans, although not to quite as profound a degree, since him getting this far has already put them in disarray. It would put the orthodox corporate types and many of the evangelicals in a tizzy. The lineup that Trump wants to bring in as his team are either outsiders or not well like by the mainstream of the party. So you can expect Trump to have to fight with much of his own party, as well as the Dems keen to re-establish themselves in the face of their loss.
If nothing else, Trump can do a lot on the trade front without Congress, based on the analyses I've seen so far. How far he would get in trying to wind down our over-involvement in the Middle East is questionable, but it does appear that he would at least stop further escalation with Russia. He also appears to have the ability to get INS rules enforced more strictly (Obama has deported more people than is widely acknowledged).
In other words, the President has a fair bit of power to act unilaterally. That does not require "political skills" since you don't need to get Congress to go along. I agree Trump would have little success with Congress, based on the precedent of Jimmy Carter, who had been a governor and had a House and Senate that were both solidly Democratic, and thus in theory should have gotten some cooperation, but brought in a team of outsiders and acted as if being post-Watergate meant he could do things differently.
Jeremy Grimm November 7, 2016 at 6:54 pmI'm probably voting for Trump only because of TPP. Thanks to the trade traitors, fast track passage made it much easier to pass TPP with a simple majority during the lame duck session. Clinton will let it ride, but Trump will probably kill it, or at least try to.
Otherwise I'd cast a feel good vote for Stein.
JustAnObserver November 7, 2016 at 7:12 pmIf DARPA's robotics program will only come up with some cool enough robots we might send a bot or two to closes down the flow of gated sewer lines or stop the flow of gated water - or add a little something.
I never never even made these suggestions - a Russian spy working for PUTIN took over my keyboard.
Kim Kaufman November 7, 2016 at 6:43 pmAfter Hillary comes the Intifada of the "deplorables" ?
Fiver November 7, 2016 at 6:49 pmI have absolutely no evidence that there's any manipulating of the polling data going on, or how that would work if it were, but it seems to me that this down to the wire close and flip-flopping polling data is hugely in the media's $$ interest. Gazillion$$ are being dumped into late media buys especially for senate races. I can't see how they could manipulate it but if the media could it's certainly in their $$ interest to do so.
oho November 7, 2016 at 7:48 pmI raised this yesterday as a comment, but would like to re-phrase as a question. Bearing in mind that the Clinton 'team' had possession of all of her e-mails for 2 years prior to the original request for the records re the Benghazi investigation, and that the Admin was kind enough to allow Clinton's lawyers to be the ones who determined which e-mails were 'work-related' and which 'personal', and further bearing in mind that the focus has been on whether or not any of the 'personal' e-mails were classified or not, I'd like to ask everyone this:
Did the FBI audit all of the e-mails that Clinton lawyers put in the 'work-related' basket? Given State is full of Clinton 'friendlies' would it not be possible that incriminating 'personal' e-mails were improperly slotted as 'work-related' to hide them with State until it all blows over? Alternately, was the FBI granted access to all Clinton's State Department '.gov' account messages, and those on the systems often referenced by Clinton and others that was used for all important, classified, secret stuff? Further, did FBI have access to all Clinton's (or others') communications using State Department (or other Government) systems that may have been sent to the Foundation, or to any of her usual suspects (Podesta, Mills, Abedin, Clinton lawyers, etc.)?
Two years is a long time for someone to think about what to do with a pile of incriminating stuff – something a bit more selective than Podesta's 'dump it'.
allan November 7, 2016 at 7:50 pmComey to be fired post-election? (written by Edward Klein, author of "Blood Feud")
Truly terrible NPR coverage of the start of the Dylann Roof trial in Charlestown on
both the morning and evening shows.No mention of the fact that a charismatic black state senator, Clementa Pinckney, was assassinated.
Pinckney is referred to, and not by name, only as the pastor of the Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church.No breathless speculations or leaks from anonymous LE sources about how Roof was radicalized
or who else might have been involved in the plot.No use of the phrase `domestic terrorism', which apparently is off limits in such cases.
Oh those tote bag liberals.
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