I have a different explanation than Richard Wolffe for why this is a Seinfeld election (a show about nothing). Wolffe cites some economic and crime statistics to demonstrate that, much like in 2000, we’re living through a time of peace and prosperity and therefore the stakes seem so low that we can focus on Trump’s tweets and Clinton’s emails without having a serious conversation about policy.
What this misses is the degree to which Red America is missing out on the prosperity. The booming areas of the country are almost all in either blue states or in the blue areas of red states. The phenomenon is only getting more pronounced as almost all the movement among the electorate that’s headed to the right is coming from working class whites in hollowed out towns who used to be Democrats. Trump is picking up steam in Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio even as suburban women around Cleveland and Pittsburgh flee his party.
These folks don’t feel like they’re first, second or third on the Democrats’ list of priority constituents, and they resent it. But they also know, because it’s indisputably true, that mainstream Republicans have done absolutely nothing for them but make empty promises and unfulfilled threats to upend the status quo.
We’ve seen the evidence. As Princeton University professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton demonstrated in their much-hyped paper last year, the aging white middle class in this country is suffering from “increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis.” They’re the only cohort in this country that isn’t seeing an increase in their life expectancy. These folks aren’t killing themselves and drinking and drugging themselves to death because they’re experiencing too much peace and prosperity. And they’s not hot for Trump because he’s a good person.
On the Democratic side, it isn’t some personality defect on Clinton’s part that explains why millennials feel like it’s uncool to express any support for her candidacy. The economy isn’t working well for them and Bernie Sanders did a better job of demonstrating that he understood that.
The big difference between the two candidates is that Clinton is prepared to address the problems her young base is experiencing, and she doesn’t have any major ideological opposition within her party that will prevent her from making a real effort. But Trump’s party is divided on the issues he’s pushing, including most prominently, immigration and free trade. So, even if his solutions had more promise for helping Red America reverse its death spiral, he would not be able to marshall enough political power to implement them.
The problem for the Republican Party is that their more establishment mainstream wing has no ideas for what to do about job loss, income inequality, the opioid epidemic, or the deteriorating health condition of their core constituents. Assuming Trump loses, what do they do then?
They can’t turn their backs on the millions of people who voted for Trump and still hope to win elections. But they’re ideologically hamstrung because they have federal power but no mandate to aggressively use the federal government to do anything to benefit their base. They have absolutely no permission to work with Clinton or the Democrats.
This election isn’t about policy for several reasons, but one of the most important is that the Republicans have no federal policy agenda at all, and the few ideas that they bat around are so highly contentious within their own party that they can’t get to base one, let alone pitch those ideas as bipartisan bills.
It’s not true that Clinton hasn’t focused on policy. Just yesterday she gave a major speech in Toledo on antitrust (of which, more soon), and her website is filled with ideas on every major issue facing the country, including policies on opioid abuse and rural communities that would disproportionately help Trump’s voters.
But you can’t have a policy debate with rageoholics, nor with a candidate who is more focused on beauty queens and his penis than with what is really ailing America. This election is about Trump, that’s true, but it’s really about a bunch of facts that explain why Jeb Bush was dead on arrival as a Republican candidate. Why was Trump nominated in the first place?
It wasn’t because people are so fat and happy and contented that they didn’t think it mattered who they nominated.
This isn’t 2000, and this isn’t really an election about nothing. It’s an election about deep dysfunction in the American political system, stemming first and foremost from the crackup of the right and their complete failure to even notice that their base is suffering deeply from things that their policies are not capable of addressing.
What we get, then, is a form of nihilism that isn’t based on an affirmative belief that there’s no truth or that nothing ultimately matters, but more on a rational assessment that there’s nothing better on offer from the GOP.
We don’t know for certain who will win the election in November, but we already know that Jeb and Boehner and Cantor’s party will be the loser.
And, until the right regroups and rethinks what they’re all about, there’s nothing to debate except Trump’s taco bowls and early dawn tweets.
the House not realistically in play, none of Clinton’s policy positions matter either.
Policy is not relevant if there is no realistic way to implement it.
We are going to beat Donald Trump.
And that is it.
Regulators and regulations CAN do a lot, as Obama has finally demonstrated if you get dept heads that want to implement progressive policies, not create corporate rentals.
Has neoliberals learned? We wait to see.
IF SCOTUS continues the unconstitutional policies that Obama has enacted of creating policy by misreading and distorting law. Title IX has been perverted into something that no one would have voted for, in particular.
There are limits about what you can do without passing laws.
Not under Obama. His extension of Title IX into subverting due process for rape allegations and creating a transgender policy out of absolutely nothing are breathtakingly bold and innovative. Unconstitutional, to be sure. But bold and innovative. No one has ever perverted and distorted words like has been done with Title IX.
Obama was able to get the increase in Infrastructure spending he wanted? He was able to enact immigration reform?
To get big things done you need to pass laws. Spend money.
And Hillary’s coattails will either be eyebrow-length, or negative. I think a lot of Republican senators will owe their positions to revulsion for Hillary and a strong desire to keep her in check.
“Realistically” is not a word for this election. There is a low probability that the House is in play–likely a couple of points less that the current probability of a Clinton landslide.
It is still possible for Trump to fail so badly that he craters the Republican hopes downticket, despite all the frantic efforts by Paul Ryan and others to buck them up.
Such a collapse will come suddenly and will be more devastating at about 10 days before the election. My intuition is that the odds are about 1 in 14 at the present, up from 1 in 30 before the Democratic convention.
In New Hampshire, with a Senate seat hotly contested, Clinton is running an ad about working with Republicans.
Which is remarkably similar to Kelly Ayotte’s message.
I really don’t see what Booman is writing about. He claims the GOP is ideologically spent. But what exactly is Clinton’s big idea? The neo-liberals are mostly out of ideas too.
I think Trump WILL collapse – I have been predicting it for months.
But I don’t see how that bleeds into the House and Senate races very much.
In New Hampshire, with a Senate seat hotly contested, Clinton is running an ad about working with Republicans.
She ran ads in PA like that too. It was more of Susan Collins and other GOPers saying Trump was unfit for the presidency or whatever. Still, that doesn’t help the Democrats take back the House or Senate. And it doesn’t make the point that Susan Collins would still vote for whatever Trump wanted were he to win on November 8th.
heh — guess a Clinton has forgotten what John Kenneth Galbraith told him.
This is just so perfect:
I remember that slogan when it was trotted out in Chicago. The people on the floor next to me just shook their heads.
Those papers on Clinton’s website are the same and will have the ending.
http://www.theonion.com/article/bridge-to-21st-century-crap-forgotten-925
And I would add that Clinton’s problems with the young ARE personal: the young simply do not trust or her of believe her.
And why is that?
Because she shifts position.
The TPP was the gold standard. Then she was against it.
Etcetera.
Her issues on trust go back to November of 2015.
I’ve never understood this TPP argument. Is that all you’ve got? As SOS, she had to follow the boss’s position. As a candidate, when she saw the details, she came out against the plan. How does that make her particularly untrustworthy? You know, Politifact rates her as the most truthful candidate among everyone who has run (maybe tied with Bernie, or maybe better, depending on the metric).
I think many progressives have given Clinton a bad rap. They’ve internalized right wing lies.
We have also “got” these examples of her non-progressiveness when it was politically expedient.
Some might also include her catastrophic vote for the Authorization for Use of Military Force. But I think subsequent events have proven that it was the pro-war vote that she believed in and the reversal that she felt forced into.
Still don’t see the mendacity in your list of Clintonian badness. Yes, we all know she’s not Jill Stein; she’s a centrist, maybe somewhat left of center on some issues, right of center on others. That does not make her a liar, or even particularly “shifty” (the term used above), or untrustworthy, any more than one would say that Bernie is shifty merely because he supports NRA positions on gun rights in Vermont.
The smear that she’s a liar originated in the right wing decades ago, and has about as much validity as other right wing smears. Read the linked article above for a bit of history on the issue.
I admire your persistence.
.
Thanks? 🙂
I’m a teacher, from a long line of them. We’re a persistent bunch. I think most of the people posting on this blog are smart and willing to listen, even change their minds.
If she’s a centrist, why are progressives “giving her a bad rap” by not supporting her?
Because most progressives with some life experience know , “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”.
Many of Clinton’s stated positions as a centrist democrat are farther to the left than any democratic presidential candidate in my lifetime. Not good enough for purity trolls on the left? Grow up. Support her, and in so doing help make progress instead of carping from the sidelines, and then push for more progressive candidates in the future.
We are.
We also don’t trust her.
And we are right to.
Welfare reform directly harmed poor people.
How many died in Iraq?
“As SOS, she had to follow the boss’s position.”
True, but I see no reason to think that wasn’t her honest position anyway. Why wouldn’t it be? TPP is just NAFTA on steroids.
I’m not saying her change of heart couldn’t be genuine, but it’s not automatically that convincing. And the president understands that if she wants to win the election she doesn’t need the TPP around her neck. On her part, she understandws that Obama will do the best he can to get it through without her. Especially since it has to be done, or not, before she would take office.
As for the right-wing lies. The right-wing lies confuse the issue, they certainly have confused you. But right-wing lies don’t in and of themselves have any bearing on left-wing criticisms.
I have not been a big fan of either of the Clintons. I know a lot of conservatives and I hear their criticisms of Hillary Clinton. They bear very little resemblance to my own.
Yawn.
Here is record on trade.
I don’t believe her for one second on TPP.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-fletcher/hillary-promised-to-reneg_b_8267424.html
Like I didn’t believe her on Nafta.
But what is really at issue, and which people like you DON”T GET, is I don’t trust her judgement.
On Iraq. On Welfare Reform. On any of another number of issues.
You can stick your internalized right wing themes up your ass.
That is itself a lie designed to change the subject.
Well, her position on free trade is pretty clear, even in this “hit piece” it comes across, though the issue is complicated. She is generally pro free trade, but she thinks portions of NAFTA are flawed and should be renegotiated, or fixed in some other way. Also true with TPP; as president she might renegotiate portions of it if she can get authority to do so. You may not agree with that position, but I don’t see it as dishonest.
As for her judgement, that’s a different issue and I agree she has made some bad calls mainly wrt foreign policy. I hope she learned from her mistakes.
As for the rest of your comment, I think you have a blind spot the size of a mac truck.
God you are a fool.
There is not a shred of evidence that any skepticism she has expressed about trade is anything but said to win votes.
It isn’t complicated.
The record isn’t in any way defensible.
To anyone with a decent sense of objectivity your defense is laughable.
Dummy, I said it’s clear she’s clearly pro free trade in general. Show me the evidence that the weak skepticism she’s expressed on the issue is not heartfelt.
Please go back and read about the 2008 Ohio democratic primary
“Heartfelt regrets”. I guess that was behind the negatives attacks on Obama. Her “heartfelt regrets”
And who is Obama vigorously campaigning for now? Who did he hire as SOS?
I remember the 2008 Ohio primary, there as mud flung from both camps. If it showed anything, other than that politicians say mean things about each other in campaigns, and that the good ones can put that aside afterwards, it showed that Clinton’s position on NAFTA has been more consistent over time than Obama’s.
If you recall, that was the campaign where Obama hung Clinton’s generally free trade stance around her neck like an anchor. She had been saying for some time that parts of NAFTA needed to be renegotiated; he was the anti-free trade candidate who wanted to throw NAFTA out and start over. Of course, once Obama gained office that was off the table. But H. is saying basically the same things today as she was then.
She has said that she will never sign a treaty that will have a negative effect on jobs.
You don’t see a problem with that piece of shit statement?
After the election, she will quickly state “TPP does not affect US jobs” and sign that gigantic shit sandwich/
Hillary has never seen a US job that she doesn’t want to have done by some Indian. She is the Senator from Punjab, after all.
And her absurd deflection of her disaster in Libya on the President:
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/04/15/defending-attack-libya-clinton-blames-obama-and-suggests
-repeat-syria
And then there was the stab at Obama over Syria – an amazing betrayal of her former President.
Of course Obama was right and stopped Clinton’s desire to get us more involved in Syria.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/
“flip-flop” all over again.
You know the one:
But do you know how that continued?
Horribly inartfully worded, obviously. But in fact not a “flip-flop” (or in your formulation, position shift) at all. Kerry voted to appropriate the money and find in the budget or raise revenues to pay for it. And voted against appropriating it without paying for it, i.e., entirely as deficit spending.
That is, he voted for one measure and against another very different measure, both involving the appropriation of $87B.
Similarly, Clinton called the then-current draft still under negotiation “the gold standard”. Then she opposed the different finalized text.
Different. Get it?
Calling one thing the gold standard, then opposing a different thing is not a shift in position.
Considering that the then-existing draft was secret it is hard to check how much has changed, but if you look at the leaks over the years it doesn’t appear to have changed that much in the broad outline, even though some details shifted.
Has she stated what in TPP she opposes and how she claims it was worded back when it was the gold standard?
I don’t recall the details, though. Suppose I could google them . . . but then so could you.
Well, if you remember specifics it is easier to find them with search engines.
What I could find was this:
Hillary Clinton comes out against TPP – CNNPolitics.com
Is this a fair description of what you remember?
If so, I think the two first points are specific, though the third one is just a consequence of TPP as a whole. And though the two first are specific, they do not outweigh the rest of TPP.
Currency manipulation is related to job loss for sure, but I don’t see how you would go about to regulate currency manipulation by states while allowing a free trade in currency by private actors. Or rather, I think that moves the power to private currency manipulators like Soros. And locking currencies has had bad effects before, for example see Argentina or the current mess in the eurozone.
In general, I have come to view the whole currency manipulation argument as a decoy. The US has the same tools that the Chinese use to keep their currency low, it just choses not to use them.
When it comes to patents, TPP already is a horrid give-away to pharmaceutical companies. If I understand Clinton right, it is not enough of a gift. Sure, in the short run this might keep jobs in the US, until the pharmaceutical companies moves the jobs somewhere else, keeps the rights given by the TPP and gets the ability to sue states (including the US) in corporate court.
And then you have the health effects on the US and the rest of the world. To listen to Dean Baker:
The TPP, Drug Patents, and President Clinton | Huffington Post
And that brings us to the worst part of TPP, the ISDS. To quote AFL-CIO:
What Is ISDS?
I hope Clinton choses these points as examples in order to torpedo TPP as a whole, but I fear that there will be slight re-negotiations and new support from Clinton.
Wait… She was Sec of State charged with negotiating these three treaties. The fallout from NAFTA and Chimese MFN was well-known at the time–job losses, cratering manufacturing, and privatizing justice through unaccountable trade courts. The very things that “bother” her how.
So why did she not instruct the negotiators to be certain that protective provisions were strongly represented in the treaties? No follow up to ascertain whether those mistakes had reappeared? Why did she not make it her business to do so, since it WAS in her job description to champion it?
It is not my impression that this is true, though I don’t know for certain that it isn’t, I just doubt it. (Partly because if Clinton had been the principal in charge of negotiating these treaties, I’d expect to be aware of it; I do pay some attention to such stuff. Partly because it’s not my impression that, generally speaking, not just in Clinton’s case, negotiating international trade treaties is the direct responsibility of the SecState, whoever it is. Not even sure that the U.S. end of international trade negotiations occurs within the State Dept., though maybe; but I have no incentive to do your homework for you on that.)
It is my strong impression, though, that if she as SecState ever did have direct involvement in or oversight of that process, she was not in that role while the treaties were being finalized.
And though my impressions could certainly be wrong, by this point I have much more confidence in them than I do in any presumption that your stated premise is accurate.
So though I could go looking for evidence that would either confirm or refute your stated premise or my impressions, that’s not my job.
It’s your premise, it’s your job to provide evidence in support of it, if you can.
Too many similar recent cases where I’ve pointed out that facts-in-evidence were lacking for some claim you’ve made, and your response was not to provide any supporting evidence, but to change the subject as though whether your claim that I questioned was, in fact, true or not just really didn’t matter (at least to you).
But it does.
here
It’s not part of State.
.
Getting really impatient with dubious propositions stated as fact, at least some of which (as here) upon examination prove blatantly false.
No obstacle, though, (again as here) to proceeding from the false premise to obviously equally invalid conclusions, though!
Man, it gets tiresome.
I can take a correction. Thank you.
I did think I knew the lines of responsibility. I was wrong about the negotiators.
The Office of US Trade Representative was created in 1962 and was never put under the supervision of State. It answers directly to the Executive.
So now we wait to see what happens, no?
Anything to blame Clinton. It’s become
knee-jerk for them by now.
.
Lifetime technocrat able to read polls and go with the flow?!?
The horrors!
Men do this, and they’re able to change their minds based on facts and a changing situation.
Women do this, and they’re just fundamentally dishonest and untrustworthy. Eve-like, even.
Don’t ever eat an apple that Hillary offers you. Next thing you know, you’re thrown out of your progressive paradise, and you’re involved in a shooting war with Russia.
It’s nothing to do with sexism. When she actually does it, then I’ll agree with you. Not that I can blame her for not having one it yet — she’s not president yet! When she is, we shall see what we shall see.
I am not as worried as I was about the trust issue, not because I trust her more (though I’m open minded, see previous paragraph), but because I think the Berniecrats, Elizabeth Warren, and like-minded people in the D party have the wind in their sails. She sort of understands that, but how seriously she takes it time will tell.
Booman writes, “Clinton is prepared to address the problems her young base is experiencing, and she doesn’t have any major ideological opposition within her party that will prevent her from making a real effort.”
This is sort of true, but it puts the accent on the wrong syllable, IMHO. How prepared she is at this point I’m not sure, but not only does she not have any major ideological opposition to address the problems of the young base — she’s going to get a lot of pressure to do so.
If there are no ideological impediments, why is Schumer working so hard not to be Majority Leader of the Senate and fighting the very people he needs to enact agendas to deal with what troubles the economy not only for Millennials but for all of us?
You mean stuff like this:
http://twitter.com/michaelwhitney/status/783316898452758528
? Yeah, Grayson wasn’t so hot. Some people here didn’t want to see that Murphy was equally as bad, in different ways. Now we’re paying the price.
The hits most mentioned are Alaska, Ohio, Florida. The fortunate misses where Schumer did not prevail are Missouri, North Carolina. The points at which more support might move things are Wisconsin, Arizona and New Hampshire.
Where he seems to have got it right is Illinois and, sadly, Indiana.
Plus there seems to be no anticipation or preparation for a Trump meltdown late in the campaign.
Remember that the actual situation is that movement conservatism has failed and as a consequence the Republican Party is in an existential crisis of its own making.
The points at which more support might move things are Wisconsin, Arizona and New Hampshire.
I think Ron Johnson is already considered burnt toast. A dead man walking. What ever phrase you want to use. My guess is Nate Silver would say Feingold has a 99.9% chance of winning in that race right now.
Strickland, who wasn’t a bad governor but not good enough for a Democrat in OH, is 75 years old and was booted out of office by the voters in favor of Kasich in 2010. Why did Democrats put forth an old man for a comeback? — guess he couldn’t find a young Republican that switched two to a Democrat a couple of years ago to back.
also from that feed: “in Penn. they gave McGinty $4.5mil to fight Fetterman”
LOL!! She got it to fight Sestak, not Fetterman. The DSCC is still pissed that Sestak clobbered Snarlin’ Arlen.
Fetterman, who does have a lot of talent, has to get real about what it takes to win a statewide nomination and then the nomination. Otherwise, he’s going to languish between 20-35% in statewide primaries because that’s the limit of voters that can’t look beyond the package.
I just received my copy of “Hillbilly Elegy”. I will read it today and tomorrow. If anyone here is interested in the issues of the mid-South, rural problems, and so forth, this book may have some pertinent information. Here is a link:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hillbilly-elegy-j-d-vance/1123457475?ean=9780062300546
The modern Horatio A.
Jacobin made the salient point that this is a book about the Ohio Valley by one who has made his way out of the region and is hectoring those left behind with the sort of rhetoric the Daniel Patrick Monyihan used about black families while ignoring the fundamental difficulty of individuals and families being able to change their economic circumstances even to get out.
It is a pretense that government economic policy does not matter even as it shows how government economic policy has failed the Ohio Valley over the past 40 years.
Nonetheless, review indicate that it is well-written and very detailed and incisive about how the economic failures feed on themselves even if it goes overboard, as does Jim Webb about how Scotch-Irish culture is deterministic.
Have you actually read the book, or just biased reviews? And EVERYTHING that DP Moynihan said about black families was true then, and remains true today. Just because people do not like the truth, does not make it false.
Since you mention Moynihan, just wondering: How many analyses are being published or discussed about the collapse of traditional family structures–or the other structural problems that Moynihan claimed for African Americans–among the people who are the subject of Hillbilly Elegy? Is that what the book addresses? Because I’d be quite interested to read it if so.
I’ll let you know. The family structure is collapsing in many groups, blacks one of them.
Wasn’t the nuclear family an economic construct of the the industrial revolution? We seem headed in different directions with some matriarchal trends and also delayed adulthood to adapt to these economic times.
Partly yes, but more of the consumer society of the post-wwII order.
During the heyday of the industrial revolution (19th century and early 20th) there were all forms of family constallations among the common industrial workers. Since poverty was widespread (if you did not luck into a segment were demand outstripped supply) cramped living quarters were also widespread and with that relatives and friends living together.
However, industrial revolution did destroy previous patterns, which varied but rarely were nuclear families. And marriage rates declined at least in European industrial cities, because when you don’t own property they are both expensive and pointless. Much was made of that moral decline.
Anyway, this set the stage for the nuclear family once post-war full employment drove up wages and made moving out and starting a family possible.
Recent work indicates that family structure is independent of social outcomes. What is important is family income and to the extent that family structure is discriminated against in employment, families are stressed and outcomes can be dysfunctional.
And what the Nixon experiment with a basic floor of income showed is that the first result of having a basic income for individuals often was dissolution of already dysfunctional families. That caused the Nixon administration to end the experiment on the basis of family values.
European experience prior to the current austerity policies shows that income is more significant than family structure in dealing with community stability. Monyihan was not just wrong about black families; his presupposition has now been proved to be wrong. But the “family values” ideology won’t let this little bit of misogyny go.
The problem here is fundamentally a matter of looking at the world from the point of view of an employer. And demanding that everyone be productive all the time, regardless of the compensation.
Some new eye-popping data: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-03/out-of-prison-out-of-work
“The percentage of NILFs(Not In Labor Force) has risen since the 1970s all over the developed world, which definitely fits with the technology-displacing-jobs explanation. But the trajectory has been much steeper in the U.S. than in other rich countries. Why is that? Eberstadt digs through the data and comes up with a surprisingly simple answer: A single variable — having a criminal record — is a key missing piece in explaining why work rates and LFPRs [labor-force participation rates] have collapsed much more dramatically in America than other affluent Western societies over the past two generations. This single variable also helps explain why the collapse has been so much greater for American men than women and why it has been so much more dramatic for African American men and men with low educational attainment than for other prime-age men in the United States.
It isn’t that men in prison are dragging down the labor force participation rate — as noted above, they are excluded from the calculation. But the great incarceration wave that began in the 1970s has produced millions of ex-convicts who are ill-prepared for jobs or are discriminated against by employers even when they are prepared. Eberstadt cites an unpublished study that estimates that 12 percent of the adult male civilian non-institutional population (that is, men not in jail) in the U.S. has been convicted of a felony, and figures the percentage must be even higher for prime-age men given that the “incarceration explosion” didn’t start till the 1970s. (Gee, did DPM have any hand in that?)
This is on the one hand tragic: millions of American men who were imprisoned in the 1970s through 1990s have been thrust into a labor market that really doesn’t want them. On the other hand, it is at least potentially fixable. Job displacement by technology is probably unstoppable, but how we punish crime is a public-policy choice. Incarceration rates have already been falling with the big declines in crime since the early 1990s, and the past few years have seen the growth of a bipartisan consensus (interrupted by the current presidential campaign, to be sure) that the U.S. throws too many people in prison for too long and doesn’t do nearly enough to rehabilitate them. Prison and sentencing reform might actually be the country’s best shot at thwarting that “linear trend” that would put a quarter of prime-age men out of work by 2050.”
(Too bad for the very profitable school to prison pipeline.)
Some months ago, I made a proposal which would address both this problem and the problem of farm labor: Parole cons into farm situations, where they could do the farm labor jobs that we hire the illegals for, and where they would be out of the neighborhoods which continue their associations with other criminals. By paroling them into a farm labor situation, they could do jobs which are not complicated in many situations, and which would give them a record of employment.
I was dumped on for this reasonable idea.
In other words, re-establish slave plantations with convicts and deport the current occupants of peonage.
Hard to be more of an asshole than you usually are. You contribute nothing to this board.
If there were ever anyone on this board who contributed interesting well researched, well thought out, and well spoken comments it is TarHeelDem. You may disagree, on this particular post, but in general, you couldn’t be more wrong.
it’s worth mentioning that “dataguy” is a well-known troll around these parts.
Just a friendly reminder.
Ah, I’m a “troll”, eh? What that means is that I have an opinion which is not handed down from Liberal Wack Central, like Brendan, who has trouble forming an independent thought. I do not. I am civil unless I get dumped on. I am basically a traditional Democrat, before the Democratic Party decided that hispandering was the way to electoral success. I will admit that I am fairly much a single-issue person – I am concerned about jobs for Americans. Hillary and most Democrats don’t give a shit about jobs, and that’s not good.
“hispandering”?
Jesus Fucking Christ.
Forget it. I don’t even want an explanation for that bit of racist drivel.
This blog has seriously gone off the goddamned rails.
I’m a racist.
Are the convicts going to be paid minimum wage so that they have a source of support when they get out?
Are the convicts going to be given recommendations to employers that certify their worthiness to be employed?
If both of those are true, it will be the first time in American history that it has ever happened.
Who is going to pay those wages if they are being paid?
Your ridiculous and tendentious objections make it clear that you, like most liberals, want ag labor to be done by illegals, and feel that Americans should be above it all. Disgusting attitude, really. For you and so many others, the whole attraction of the illegals is that they can be paid shit wages. A sensible suggestion such as mine is met by idiotic comments from you. On the other hand, if someone suggested allowing a huge number of illegal criminals to do these jobs directly from Mexico, you would be all for it, because you are in favor of paying them shit wages.
You really are amazing.
I am pretty clear that the agribusiness industry wants agricultural labor to be done by peons tied to the land without possibility of alternatives.
You do understand that agricultural labor does not have the same minimum wage as the currently deflated minimum wage for all other work?
You do understand that it is the employers who are hiring undocumented immigrants and even (when not in the eye of publicity) sending out recruiters to line up the transport of more. And in the glare of publicity, immigration of all types, including undocumented immigrants has dropped, and not only as a result of harsh enforcement that Obama has done since 2009.
I am for local people being paid living wages to work in the fields. The employers of these people are not, and only the law will require them to do so. Maybe deporting the employers instead of the undocumented workers would work and be a lot cheaper and violate the same Constitutional guarantees.
I keep wondering which immigrant got your job. You are so passionate about this issue that you don’t completely understand.
Agricultural labor around here was and still is to some extent poor black workers and independent poor white and black farmers. Nonetheless, employers have brought in Latino workers, naturalized, documented, and undocumented to pick their crops for less. And construction contractors then offered a leg up out of the fields as they could underbid their (independent) competition.
Notice here that where folks diss other folks for not accepting bad opportunities, with immigrants they diss for accepting bad opportunities that employers claim that others will not take. Those others might understand US labor law slightly better than the immigrants who are being dissed.
Blaming the victim comes so easy to conservatives, doesn’t it.
Yes, I am somewhat aware of that.
The entire point is to provide a good for the prisoner (a job, a success after prison) and a good for the farmer. In my conception, the prisoner would get a parole release, hopefully an early one. This would only work for specific inmates (criteria to be established later). They would be given the opportunity of release into the farm environment. They would live on the farm, in housing already available for migrants. They would be paid farm minimum. This would be for 1-2 years. Hopefully, if the inmate found the situation good, he could move into a higher paying job on the same or neighboring farm after 1-2 years.
This obviously needs more thought and development. It’s clear that much is in need of thinking. I do know one thing – releasing inmates to return to their previous situation is not working, and the large number of men without jobs is very bad for the men, for their society, and for the country. Similarly, the use of illegals in farms is also bad. We do not need illegals. Unless, of course, what is desired is cheap labor, lower than market level. And that is what many on the left want – as they frequently say, how else can we keep food cheap?
The people paying shit wages are the farmers. Two major agricultural regions near my home in Portland, Oregon are the Willamette and Hood River valleys. Products from these areas are shipped all over the US. And whaddya know? Next to highways passing through those areas, there are lots of Trump/Pence signs next to the road, on land belonging to Willamette valley growers of nursery stock or Hood River valley growers of cherries, apples and pears.
As you ought to know, the price you pay for plants at a nursery or fruit at a supermarket is far more than the cost to tend the plants and harvest the products. Paying the agricultural workers a reasonable wage would have a quite modest effect on retail prices. But again, whaddya know? It’s those farmers with the Trump signs in their fields who protest that paying a decent wage is impossible.
If those felons were used as farm labor, you can be damn sure that they’d be exploited, too, unless protections were put in place. The issue is not who does the agricultural labor but whether they are fairly paid and treated.
I realize, of course, that you intentionally refer to illegal aliens as “illegals”, and more generally attempt to dehumanize them, in order to piss off folks on the political left.
Me, I realize that, whenever I try to lib-splain something to someone else about what they are thinking and how my superior intellect understands the motivation for that thinking, that I look like a fucking moron. Something you should think about. Since you look like a fucking moron explaining what I am thinking about. But, hey, that’s just me.
I think your frequent recourse to insults and profanity is a pretty clear indication that you’ve got nothing particularly useful or important to write. It’s “illegals” 24/7.
I note that Tarheel also keeps a polite tone in response to your provocations.
Second reminder: dataguy is a troll. he should be treated as such.
The idea is to make incarceration as much as possible a free ride for taxpayers by selling prisoner labor to for-profits…might even make a little profit for the govt. By law they don’t have to pay the workers a cent.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-labor-in-america/406177/
“We now incarcerate more than 2.2 million people, with the largest prison population in the world, and the second highest incarceration rate per capita. Our prison populations remain racially skewed. With few exceptions, inmates are required to work if cleared by medical professionals at the prison. Punishments for refusing to do so include solitary confinement, loss of earned good time, and revocation of family visitation. For this forced labor, prisoners earn pennies per hour, if anything at all.”
“…in the cases where incarcerated workers have sued their prison-employers to enforce minimum wage laws or the FLSA, courts have ruled that the relationship between the penitentiary and the inmate worker is not primarily economic; thus, the worker is not protected under the statutes. By judging the relationship between prisons and incarcerated workers to be of a primarily social or penological nature, the courts have placed wage and working condition protections out of reach for incarcerated workers.”
Did you know there is a huge prison strike presently ongoing–the biggest ever?
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-national-strike-against-prison-slavery
Yeah, I have heard about that prison strike.
The whole prison thing is terrible. Obama has made some very positive steps – ending private prisons (at least for the moment), releasing inmates.
I am hoping that after Nov 8, he releases a whole shitload of inmates who were terribly wronged by the drug laws. If he released a couple hundred thousand, now that would be something, wouldn’t it?
also undercuts employment in the nearby towns
Wow. The projection is breathtaking.
Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own eye?
That comment is so out of whack it’s not even worth a reply.
You are so far out of your element. Tarheel has a long history of offering well thought out commentary. I doubt we agree one hundred percent, but I respect Tarheel’s contributions tremendously. And of all the people who could be potentially characterized as assholes, Tarheel is not one of ’em. Far from it.
Funny for you to say that. From the way back machine I once worked as a hand on a dairy farm. That farm took on prisoners on work release programs.
I think such programs should be revived. The idea is a sound one. You get the ex-con out of the bad environment where he learned to be a criminal. You get him experience and a job. You replace an illegal. It’s a win-win-win.
What happens when the work-release subsidy ends at the release of the convict or a training period of, say six months? What is the probability that the employers will take the worker during the subsidized (or cut-rate wage) period and and lay them off (or trump up some cause for firing) at the end of the subsidy?
That was how CETA Work-Release programs in the late 1970s turned out to operate. And if they were so great a conservative solution, why did Ronald Reagan kill them?
There is nothing so paralyzing to the intellect and to the conceptual faculty as the total certitude of failure. Seems to be your operating approach – think negative, and be sure to try nothing whatsoever.
This is the reality of how CETA work release in fact worked at the turn of the 1980s. Not negative. It was how it worked. You could not trust employers to employ released convicts without a permanent subsidy.
Tell me how to get employers out of the blanket categorization and looking at what people could actually do. The negativity was paralyzing because their negativity, profiling, and discrimination was paralyzing them from possibly getting good employees who had changed their behavior.
It reversed the cart and the horse. What Monyihan described was a temporary truth. His analysis reversed cause and effect, something that effective policy would show but is not allowed to because the economy requires an underclass somewhere the depress wages and salaries an create the accounting entries to show what passes for profit.
Remember that in the neoliberal perfectly competitive economy, profit tends toward zero. In the real world the approach to perfect competition causes profit to tend toward zero as well. The economy creates the poor, their poverty creates the conditions that Monyihan cites. Institutional efforts to keep people from competing — racism, underfunded schools, lack of counseling services, lack of addiction treatment services, housing segregation by class and ethnicity, cause the creation of differentially poor communities.
Monyihan and now Vance are just engaged in arguing for not action by blaming the poor.
People do turn around their lives when provided the incentives and tools.
The middle class is too smug in thinking that those have ever been provided adequately in poor communities because middle class communities make sure to get their share and more of these services that they don’t as intensely need, leaving little for poor communities.
In order to promote gentrification, Chicago has closed half of its mental health clinics and a third of its public schools, almost all in poor communities. And then starts Daniel Monyihaning those same poor communities when the murder rate climbs and gangs become the primary social institution that can provide any shred of dignity.
It is time to stop shaming the poor and create the economy that can provide the jobs and/or the income to permit life with dignity. That really is a mainstream New Deal position. It worked, but it made it more difficult for people to lord it over other people and feel exceptional.
A much better view of white poverty in America, and by extension other situations of poverty as well, is Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-year hidden history of inequality in America.
America was settled as a means of forcibly moving the poor of Britain caught in the upheaval of the enclosures that were the end of feudalism out of their permanent migratory homelessness and to some “refuse dump” away from the view of the upper crust.
When democracy actually happens the poor are able to speak; that happened last with the crisis of the Depression in 1932. And until the US conservatives regained their footing, poverty declined in the US. And still declines slightly during every Democratic administration since then.
Monyihan’s policies retarded that process and he single-handed killed Hillarycare, likely even forced a public-private form on the Clinton’s healthcare reform.
Those who think he was right have never lived in the communities he was describing.
Good review of Isenberg’s White Trash:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/09/the-original-underclass/492731/
A detailed takedown of Vance’s Hillbilly book:
https:/www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/hillbilly-elegy-review-jd-vance-national-review-white-working-cla
ss-appalachia
Didn’t Moynihan argue for a jobs program to help with the family and poverty situation he saw? . He was part of LBJs war on poverty. We still need something like a permanent jobs program maybe modeled after the WPA. Eliminating poverty should still be a goal. It is not a given that there must always be a poor. There are millions unemployed and underemployed today. And, if we were smart and brave, we would put them all to,work.
What people need is a way to become agents, not clients. This is the problem with welfare and all government programs. By making them clients, all that is generated is a client user mentality. A mindset of agent – I can do something – is what is needed.
In the inner cities, there is a huge issue with joblessness. We need to find a way to get kids to work. This means eliminating illegals, who take the low end jobs that poor people need to get started. Many people could wash dishes. Washing dishes is an honorable job, as is housecleaning. My grandma cleaned stores. It was an honorable job. If illegals take those jobs, then Americans cannot get them. If you cannot get a job, you join a gang.
Few employees with jobs are in any way treated like agents. The entire job-hunting process is a patronage-client relationship through networks of “who you know”. The problem that folks in redlined or isolated communities have is that they are so isolated by distance or discrimination that they do not know the entry people into the network. Most of what the US Job Service did before the conservatives isolated it was provide access to those networks, pre-screening and some personal knowledge of which people might be a good fit with the employer. Professional get this sort of service from fee-paid employment services.
Schools in most communities find it easier to get the rules followed by stamping out the mindset of agent. Poor communities even moreso. And the police in poor communities is not exactly into dealing equally with other agents.
You are privileged if you see those jobs as within the reach of the unemployed in the current economy. The job market is much more rigid and stratified than it was in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s. By the year 2000, when I was unemployed in the IT bubble burst, I could not be considered for other employment because I was stereotyped as college-educated IT and dissatisfied. I did get a six-week temporary job through one of my wife’s work colleagues fitting tuxedoes during prom season. It was hilarious to see how female-dominated the market for tuxedoes is. Guys and their moms for prom, guys and their gals for prom, guys hesitating at the door and their fiancees getting the wedding tux package.
Sometime it is not the matter of the honorable job, it is that the boss is a jerk and enjoys firing people, or any job is unavailable. And then there is discrimination against people who got in trouble and cannot provide an employer certainty that they have changed–and besides there is a line of people who have not gotten in trouble.
The solution in inner cities and rural communities is more small businesses. Those communities cannot recreate that by themselves.
It is amazing that illegals were not the big huge problem in the 1990s that they have become now among Republicans. More employer interest driving Republicans then.
Some people are so out of luck that they cannot join a gang.
The underclass is policy-driven structural part of most economies. Those will real concern for those trapped in that situation could fake a little empathy every now and then — it seemed to help in the New Deal and the Great Society parts of our history.
Actually, I agree 100% with you on the small business idea. That really is a good idea. I’ve been thinking about that too.
In many of these communities, WalMart has replaced a whole bunch of stores, McDonald’s has replaced restaurants, and so forth. Entire towns have been converted into “company towns” in that they have no stake in the businesses. The Nation of Shopkeepers has been converted into a Nation of Store Clerks, and that has been a disaster.
I am sure that certain kinds of businesses were not allowed to operate until the 1970s. It seems to me that I remember that in many places, branch banks were not allowed. This enabled local banks to continue to survive. Once branch banking was begun, local banks were quickly bought up. Today, we do still have local credit unions. Those are local businesses.
In Europe, there are very few chain businesses. American chain restaurants are starting to come in and hopefully they will be kept out. Small businesses are all over, little stores which sell specific things. In certain cities in Italy, they are now keeping out immigrant businesses from the traditional areas which is good. No one wants to buy arab food in the heart of the tourist area in Parma, Italy. They want italian food. Let the arab restaurants go to the outskirts.
What folks in a development project on the West Side of Chicago found 40 years ago is that private capital redlines business investment there. The white NGO trying to demonstrate that a community could reformulate itself into a better situation found that it had to have some pretty prominent Chicago executives committing their own money to generate a $4 million finance package for new construction of a shopping center and those white executives had to act as guardian angels in order to keep the local businessmen from being denied regular operating capital. Such was the racial discrimination in banking. Likely it has not disappeared.
Illinois might still have some remnant of its once strict branch banking laws. A local bank in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago had a de facto branch only because it could not locate its drive-through operations directly adjacent to the historic bank lobby.
It is curious that you think tourists should dictate the structure of cities. To keep the tourist business coming no doubt would be a good thing economically, but Arabs can own restaurants that serve Italian cuisine, and Italians can own restaurants that serve Arab specialties of Mediterranean cuisine.
Other businesses that might not be allowed to operate even now are casinos, fireworks, BINGO parlors, electronic poker, and brothels. But casinos are the currently viable economic development vehicle for some Indian tribes — but not all. It is a strange combination of market factors that allow casinos to be a viable business. And it seems the market is easily saturated–as Donald Trump found out.
Tourists do not go to Venice to eat kebabs. They go to Venice to eat Italian food. Tourists do not go to Paris to eat kebabs. They go to Paris to each French food. Let the kebab shops go to the outskirts. It would be idiotic for a tourist area to allow kebab shops to destroy the tourist experience.
Why would either of these places be interested in what tourists want just because Americans are tourists in Europe? Maybe Venetians and Parisians might like kebabs (to use your stereotype of Arab food) once in a while–enough to support a kebab shop near San Marco or the Sorbonne.
This has gotten a bit silly but hopefully Venetians have some agency with respect to Venice and Parisians with respect to Paris.
And of course Italians want to eat kebabs, and chinese food, and korean tacos. Just not in the tourist centers. However, it is also true that reports from Italy suggest that Italians do not want to eat foreign food in the same way that US citizens want to eat foreign food. Tourists absolutely do not want to go abroad to eat Pizza Hut.
I’m not sure how agency would work. I think the Feds should be the employer of last resort, something like FDR did. They would employ all surplus labor at the min wage and benefits. In that way there is no or little unemployment payments.
That requires a work list of projects that actually contribute to society and use a variety of talents that most current taxpayers would find frivolous. Art work in public buildings, documentation of American life in crisis, travel guidebooks, plays and other performances.
Both of you have good ideas. Small businesses in the cities, and farm work in the country.
I would add civil service such as caring for elderly, homeless and dispossessed, plus massive eco-projects such as tree planting.
The important thing is to provide dignity through pride in accomplishment.
Provide funds yes, but teach integrity and work ethics as priority for social mobility over mere knack turning a fast buck.
WPA and CCC were federal programs and not handed over to the states to sabotage. It did not involve public/private creatures to loot the taxpayer.
Those Reagan work programs and training grants were Reagan kludge designed to enrich the contractors, not produce jobs. I remember CETA very well.
Thanks for pointing this out.
LBJ – 1964 SOTU address:
And legislatively they did deliver — slightly slower than LBJ requested but they got it done.
Then we just had to have a war — “domino theory” booyah; just like the new cold war crap that’s being spouted today — which sucked up too much of the needed funding.
It did so well that Richard Nixon sent Howard Phillips to kill it. A court case of the community action agency NGOs prevented Phillips from succeeding. Ronald Reagan halfway succeeded in turning it into just another bureaucracy by rolling it into state block grants.
Of course, a whole lot of local governments in poor areas sabotaged the program by naming a retired military officer to run it.
Oh, they all played their part in killing. More so Republicans in the early years, but Democrats got on board with it with the GOP agenda a couple of decades later.
It’s not my intention to hector anybody about failings real or alleged. I would simply point out that, as far as I can tell, the awful problems of suicide and alcoholism and opioid addiction among working-class whites are the worst in places where there is little in-migration of population. And those are the core areas of Trump’s support.
No in-migration means no new ideas coming from outside, and nobody questioning entrenched ideas.
I understand that people can become very attached to their homeland and resist moving away even when circumstances are bad. But some people do, including the author of Hillbilly Elegy. And I reflect upon the millions of immigrants to this country, my grandparents among them, who were fleeing really bad circumstances in the “old country”.
It’s very well established now that forests and wildlife have returned to New England. This has happened because the descendants of the colonial-era farmers who cleared the land left their farms, or at least abandoned farming. I have no doubt that many of those people did not want to leave their farms or change their livelihood. And yet the return of New England’s forests and wildlife is widely celebrated.
I think you are mistaking recent journalism for a study of the actual geographical distribution of alcoholism and opioid addiction.
Suburban neighborhoods with sufficient wealth for care and discreet neighbors find it easier to hide those problems than do rural communities rooted in moralizing churches or minority communities surveilled by police and social services.
Insularity is not just a condition in rural areas.
On the abandonment of farming on the East Coast, read Wendell Berry’s classic The Unsettling of America. It happened because government policies subsidized large-scale agribusiness.
One of the elements of despair in a lot of places is the inability to finance getting away and finding opportunities. Some do and rebound. Others look at their experiences and never try.
Thanks for pointing out all of that.
“Trump is picking up steam in Western Pennsylvania…”
I don’t think this is true; polling data is not sifted out on a community-by-community basis, but the blue strongholds of Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh and the Mon Valley) still seem like blue strongholds. The struggling communities out here were hollowed out almost a generation ago.
Now it is true that prosperity growth around these parts has been disproportionately within the borders of Pittsburgh itself, and not the surrounding communities. And it’s also true that real estate values have boomed in the city but have remained stagnant in the suburbs (even the wealthier ones). But that’s largely the product of urbanization, and it’s a reversal of what happened in generations past.
At the end of the day, Clinton has been consistently around +5 in Pennsylvania, which is almost exactly the same margin that Obama had four years ago. If there’s growth in Trump’s electorate, I’d wager that it’s a reddening of the already-red parts (the middle of the state, minus Harrisburg). But we’ll see after the election.
That’s an idiotic column by Wolffe.
Every election has consequences – all you have to do is compare the difference between median positions of the parties on taxation, regulation, the MIIC, civil rights, general health/welfare issues – that’s your difference.
Just because reporters are too stupid to understand this, too incompetent to explain it, and the public is too ‘moranic’ to deal with it has no impact on the real stakes. Just because you may in the basement with your mental lights off, doesn’t mean it’s dark outside.
Boo, I get there’s underlying causes, but frankly, I also see a decent amount of racism and outright reactionary dislike for anything liberals are for. I’m in a very red district of California, and do a lot of work in even redder areas, and what I see has little to do with liberal or progressive concerns. People don’t care about banks, nor do they care about a host of other things the left does. They mainly care about stuff that makes liberals mad, and don’t give a shit about the rest.
I think pissing off liberals is sort of a rite of passage, a way to create social cohesion.
Reactionaries gotta react.