Writing in the New York Times, Ashley Parker casts some shade on Donald Trump’s triumphant reaction to the U.K.’s decision to separate from the European Union.
Early in June, Mr. Trump did not even know what Brexit referred to, and as recently as Wednesday, Mr. Trump said that his opinion on the referendum was insignificant because he had not been following the issue closely.
Amazingly, Trump landed in Scotland today to promote his golf course, seemingly without realizing that the Scots are pissed as hell about the outcome of the referendum.
Just arrived in Scotland. Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back. No games!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2016
In a stunning display of tone-deafness, he told the assembled reporters how great it was that the U.K. has asserted its independence. And then proceeded to explain how the tumbling English pound would help his golf course make money.
Ewen MacAskill, a reporter for The Guardian, had an interesting exchange with Trump.
Asked about [Prime Minister David] Cameron, [Trump] expressed sympathy for him, even though there had been what he described as rough patches, presumably a reference to the former prime minister’s criticism of the presumptive Republican candidate. Asked about Boris Johnson, he declined to comment.
Trump said his relationship with the UK was a “love-fest”. I asked Trump why Cameron was not prepared to meet him. He replied: “David Cameron would have met me. David Cameron was negotiating to meet me. But I do not think he wants to meet anyone right now.”
I said no senior UK or Scottish politician wanted to meet him, citing Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond, and suggested it was because he was toxic. Taking offence at the question, he described me as “a nasty, nasty guy”.
Nothing unusual there.
Trump’s overall reaction, including in an official statement he placed on Facebook, was completely oblivious to the strong possibility that the Brexit vote will effectively end the United Kingdom as a country by leading to Scottish and Northern Irish independence.
The people of the United Kingdom have exercised the sacred right of all free peoples. They have declared their independence from the European Union, and have voted to reassert control over their own politics, borders and economy. A Trump Administration pledges to strengthen our ties with a free and independent Britain, deepening our bonds in commerce, culture and mutual defense. The whole world is more peaceful and stable when our two countries – and our two peoples – are united together, as they will be under a Trump Administration.
Setting aside that Scotland was the worst possible place to make this pitch, it’s not clear that anything “British” will remain after all the ramifications of this vote play out. Whatever Britain was, it is no longer that.
Of course, since Trump didn’t even know what Brexit was until sometime in the beginning of this month, it’s pretty clear that he’s just winging it.
At least his staff was presented with some nice nazi golf balls, so the trip wasn’t a total loss.
Its a useful talking point, but prior to June Trump had discussed the British referrendum. Its likely he was familiar with the idea but not the specific term.
These things are hardly compatible.
It’s like talking about the Chicago Cubs and not knowing what the World Series is.
You may have mentioned the Cubs but you know absolutely nothing about baseball.
I see it more as talking about the Cubs winning the championship but not knowing that the World Series is the championship.
Also fuck the Cubs.
Sort of like Ted Cruz in Indiana talking up those marvelous basketball rings.
He’s a presidential candidate — how can he be “unfamiliar with the term”? How can you possibly miss it if you’re paying even the slightest attention to world affairs — let alone obsessively following them to the degree one would expect from a national candidate — one who boasts of having “the best ideas”?
http://crooksandliars.com/2016/06/donald-trump-knows-what-brexit-not-what-it
Also, too:
https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/746406051747008513
Pretty good work from the campaign rapid response team.
He was asked about Brexit in an interview some time ago, and the interviewer (I forget who) had to explain it to him.
Had he understood this in any way, the handling of his visit would have been vastly different. And he wouldn’t be talking about how the Scots were celebrating. They weren’t, unless it was for the new chance they’ll get at independence. They voted “Remain.”
Trump knows only what people tell him about. When he reads the papers, it’s to gather grievances, not to inform himself about anything else. He reads the articles with the word “Trump” in them, and then only selectively.
I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever that he has ever read the U.S. Constitution. I am amazed no one asks him about it. Well, no I’m not amazed. Just depressed.
Katie Couric, a desperate nation needs you to save it again.
The more I think about it, the worse I realize Trump is — I think it goes beyond conservatism or even fascism; I think he represents a darker, more primal destructive ethos — the phenomenon is literally anti-democracy or even anti-Enlightenment.
Digby’s pointed out this Trump’s followers during the primaries seemed to be “anti-government” — building on how Ross Perot (a genuinely successful entrepreneur, unlike Trump) successfully re-defined the parlimentary process of our government as “gridlock”; as a problem that “only a businessman” (meaning, an unchallenged authority figure bent exclusively on profit) could solve.
That’s all true, but it’s worse than that — they’re genuinely anti-thinking; anti-learning. This Scotland stuff (which they’ll defend) is one of the clearest examples: Trump is the opposite of a good teacher who encourages you to learn; to understand; to start by acknowledging your ignorance and follow by working to overcome it. Trump sends exactly the opposite message: He (and “you”) don’t need to learn anything; you can trust your instincts, your “gut”…and trust him, because of his superiority. Those people urging you to explore the world and learn about it and be daunted and humbled by it…are wrong; all you have to do is trust the biases you already have. It’s a return to the Middle Ages.
My right-wing cousin always supported Palin more when she got things wrong. My cousin doesn’t understand highbrow trivia about the ‘Bush doctrine’ and ‘Brexit’ and ‘facts,’ so fuck any elitist asshole who mocked Palin for not knowing. He felt that mockery–even the questions–as a personal attack.
Completely anti-knowledge and anti-expertise, but not for the sake of hating them. It was almost completely defensive: he felt personally savaged by any presumption of knowledge or intellectual adequacy. I can hear him saying, ‘Screw the Scotch if they mock Trump for not knowing what their shitty country wants, we could bomb them into goo.’
And if you said anything about ‘Scotch,’ forget it.
They are the ones who are tired of being looked down upon by the meritocracy, tired of being considered stupid, tired of being pushed to go to college in order to get a bullshit job, proud of when they actually work on something they can see accomplished. If working, they are the ones who are double-shifting, working all sorts of crazy hours and schedules, neglecting their families, while the “smart ones” are charging hours while golfing and doing things that undermine the profitability of the company and endanger their jobs.
Taking away the left and labor unions deprived them of political power as an alternative and stigmatized them as potential socialists and communists and forever unemployable.
They are stuck in a nominally democratic country that does not respect their position of their views. To some degree they bear individual responsibility for their situation, but the threat they see are minorities of all types who are beginning to be ambitious enough to do better and they are scared, nay panicked, or being left behind. And at the moment no one is saying that the Conservative sold them a load of bullshit 40 years ago and, look, never delivered on the promise of a better economy that conservative policies will deliver.
Not even the Democrats are saying that everything Ronald Reagan promised in 1980 failed, save the collapse of the Soviet Union, which the US did not respond to at all well.
The future of the US is at stake and everyone wants to focus on Trump’s distractions because it is so damn easy to write about.
“They are the ones who are tired of being looked down upon by the meritocracy, tired of being considered stupid, tired of being pushed to go to college in order to get a bullshit job, proud of when they actually work on something they can see accomplished. “
Exactly.
Yes.
Compare the Meritocracy to the scribe class in ancient Egypt. As long as things went well they were fine with the Pharoah being a god and the hoi polloi building pyramids. Or wars, as long as they and their kids didn’t have to fight it.
Trump is not a “distraction” — he’s the face of a very dangerous force in American politics.
And, yes, there’s always a legitimate grievance (or a set of legitimate grievances) that’s being exploited. The same thing was true in the Wiemar Republic. Nobody’s dismissing the specific ways in which working people have gotten screwed. That’s got nothing to do with it — the forces of capital and labor, of nobility and serfdom, haven’t changed in centuries. What has changed is the available forms of redress, which have evolved since the Enlightenment and in the last 100 years. I’m saying, Trump embodies is the retrograde action; the anti-rational, anti-egalitarian hindbrain impulse to go backwards, to erase those goals.
None of this is trivial or peripheral; that’s a dangerous fantasy.
Apparently not dangerous enough for the Democratic establishment to deal with defusing that set of legitimate grievances.
The Democrats are not yet dealing with these people where they live; they are writing them off and letting them go their own way.
Nonetheless the commentary on Trump’s distraction and the assurance that he will defeat himself is the distraction from what needs to be done in the next five months.
Post-modernism thought itself represents the toleration of anti-rational, anti-egalitarian hindbrain impulses to go backwards because of the fact that no one person has the unique claim on truth. The practical solipsism of “opinions are like assholes; everyone has one” of current political discussions does not allow the sorting out of what are the real dangers in this moment.
One of them is smaller and more usable nuclear weapons. Another is Trump being able to order their use. But Clinton being able to order their use and the waste of more trillions of dollars on a continued arms race has its own risk that we better face up to. Having a Congress that will check and balance whatever President toward integrity and prudence instead of goading them toward corruption and recklessness is the key task of the 2016 election.
Trump is a distraction from that–promoting concentration on the power of the Presidency and the idea that only electing a President is important to preventing Trumpism. Preventing a Trumpist Congress (even if it just the transmogrification of the current Republican Party) is equally important. Preventing a Democratic Congress that caters to the worst elements of Clinton policy is equally important.
One of both of the political parties could disappear in this election. Alternatively, we could arrive at an even worse gridlock. Trump the person and his ever-changing message is a distraction. What his campaign is doing behind the scenes is not; watch where he intends to win by what his campaign does.
And nearly full marks again.
Hint: This is not about you, or the American people. It’s an English thing. It’s not a Trump thing, nor proof of the supremacy of Bernie. Anyone with even a modest understanding of British nationalism knows this. You apparently don’t.
If all you have is a Bernie Sanders, everything looks like American neoliberalism.
Guess you never heard the term neoliberalism before Sanders entered the 2016 presidential race. FYI, it’s not new and wasn’t created by Sanders. It’s meaning has been well established for decades and has been used in political discourse by lefties with some basic to high level knowledge of economics for nearly two decades.
You think you’re denigrating and mocking Sanders with comments like this, but the truth is you’re displaying your ignorance and penchant for bullying.
It’s been about a week since you’ve told me that I don’t have any ethics.
Clearly, I’m the bully.
Keep on keepin’ on, boss.
…on purpose. That kind of loses you the argument.
Hilariously wrong analysis and projection of Marie3’s bullying onto me requires some parsing.
Let’s go!
Incorrect. I’ve been reading and commenting here for years, often regarding economics. Not only do I know what neoliberalism means, I actually use it when appropriate, which means, not in every other sentence I type out on any and all subjects. In fact, I often pair neoliberalism and neoconservatism together with the very apt word “Empire” (capital E, always), as Empire ALWAYS predisposes a country to neoliberalism and neoconservatism. In fact, I find the word Empire to more accurately reflect what the US government is, which is why I often agree in theory with things that Arthur Gilroy posts, although I see his PermaGov as just another euphemism for Empire (the same as I see neoliberal and neoconservative as just euphemisms for economic and foreign policy issues that any functioning Empire exploits on behalf of the people who own and operate that very government.
Thanks for the history lesson.
Now, the fun parts!
Wow!
As a Sanders supporter and Sanders voter, I am in no way denigrating or mocking Sanders.
In fact, the very wording makes clear that I am not mocking Sanders. And I quote “If all you have is a Bernie Sanders, everything looks like American neoliberalism.”
As far as I know, Bernie Sanders doesn’t have a Bernie Sanders as a universal tool to use for every single problem in the universe. Unlike, say, a Bernie Sanders f̶a̶n̶a̶t̶i̶c̶ supporter.
Not that you care, but I have posts from years ago discussing who my ideal politicians are. I have multiple posts where I say that I want a Congress, Supreme Court, and White House full of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warrens.
But, it won’t stop me from mocking self-righteous people who project their own bullying and denigration onto people who disagree with them on the issue of whether Hitlery Clinton is worse than Strongman Trump. For me, and the rest of us in objective, observable reality, trying to posit Clinton as being worse than Trump is hilarious, and very sad. For me and the rest of us in objective, observable reality, even allowing Trump to be within literal striking distance of the White House is dangerous.
Strongman Trump wields tens of millions of right-wing authoritarian followers who, as he himself said, would still vote for him even if he shot someone out on the street.
So, you’re trying to tell me that I’m over-reacting, when I and others here have been told that we’re ignorant, naive, immoral, unethical, or, uh, lesser progressives with our “satisfaction with the mediocrity of [our] li[ves]” because we see in Strongman Trump a dangerous man with dangerous followers?
Right.
Sure thing.
I spent hours watching the returns. What stunned me was the reaction of Labor MP’s who talked about why Brexit won.
The reason: they had lost credibility with working people. It was in Labour constituencies in the north and west where leave won that made a large part of the difference. Labour did not have a message on globalization that made people feel like they had a reasonable alternative.
And the Democratic Party really doesn’t have much of a message either.
So in the absence of a decent message that speaks to peoples economic insecurities and their declining incomes, they become open to demagogues on the right.
The underlying dynamic is very similar to here.
“The Democrats are not yet dealing with these people where they live; they are writing them off and letting them go their own way.”
I disagree. I disagree very strenuously. Making a claim does not make it so. If this claim were true, Obama would not have been elected and re-elected, and we wouldn’t have held Congressional majorities this generation, a generation which you completely write off as one filled with full stop corruption by the Democrats.
What recent Congresses and Presidents compiled by far the most substantial set of progressive accomplishments? The first Congresses of the Clinton and Bush Administrations.
How did the public respond to those Congresses? They tossed them out of office in obscene numbers.
I wish you would spend some of your substantial rhetorical skills discussing that fact, a fact which argues against your standard claim that Democrats would win more elections if they pushed hard left legislative agendas.
I intended to write “…first Congresses of the Clinton and Obama Administrations,” of course.
What did Clinton get done in the first portion of his Presidency? HCR, the major focus, failed.
Oh – NAFTA. Not sure if that counts as a progressive accomplishment.
There was a budget act of ’93 – but I don’t remember a stream of progressive accomplishments.
But comparing that to Obama – whose accomplishments dwarf Clinton, seems incorrect.
I have referred to Bill Clinton as the best Republican President of the 20th Century. Works for me.
The 102nd Congress passed…
…and more.
The attempt to pass very progressive health care reform took up a lot of political capital and time. That it failed to make it through a Democratic Congress doesn’t eliminate the fact that they tried to climb this mountain.
The campaigns run by Republicans in 1994 didn’t attack NAFTA. They ran against tax increases which they claimed would destroy the economy, the failed health care reform which they claimed was a Communist plot, and gun grabbing Democrats.
They were extremely successful running this campaign against Clinton and Democrats. The general public hasn’t shown a consistent appetite for the policies you and I prefer.
Amazing. Wrong in almost every particular. Nearly full marks.
And when Scotland votes for independence in order to remain in the E.U., Trump will claim he got it right. It’s a distraction.
Here is an important reality:
First of all, has this been a loyal Democratic area or swingy during the Obama years?
Second the idea of “shopping around” means they have to be presented with something that is not “more of the same”. Trump definitely hits that value proposition with something that is as empty of policy as the standard American diet is of nutrition.
Will the Democratic Party actually campaign this year or with they phone it in like they did their sit-in. My confidence in the sanity of the US political system to correct itself is diminishing with every passing buck.
The Internet is a great place, there is ALWAYS someone who shows up to explain what the real problem is.
.
There are African-American Republicans (not many) in my neighborhood whose response to Trump is to say, “This year, I’m an orphan.” One is the son of a Pittsburgh steelworker who got the opportunity to go to Pitt from mid-sixties affirmative action (he is sharp, it was not a hard decision for Pitt); the other is a lady who grew up in a dysfunctional family in a housing project in Greensboro and worked her way out through a series of jobs, her own grit, and loans that gave her a college education and a path to teaching. Both are big on the “individual initiative” message of the Republican Party.
What would it take to flip them to vote for a Democrat for President for this year? They aren’t hearing it yet.
Most of my white neighbors are either for Sanders and willing to vote for Clinton or originally for Clinton. My white relatives in a rural area and my white schoolmates who continue to live in the small city I grew up in are solidly for Trump–even the religious right ones.
The dismissal of the risk of a Trump victory is troubling in a year in which actual mobilization and turnout all over the country by Democrats could take back both the Senate and the House.
The sparkle pony meme has become truly tiresome because it misreads the criticism and dismisses the humanity of the critic.
The “OBAMA AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY ARE THE ENEMY” meme is more than tiring: it’s dispiriting because it’s openly delusional and enormously counterproductive. It works to disguise political realities and, cumulatively, depresses voter turnout.
All politicians can use pushes to the left. Making pinatas of Democratic Party leaders and holding them entirely responsible for economic, civil rights and law enforcement inequality seems to me to be an extraordinarily ineffective way to push politicians to the left. Calling the sit-in Congressional Dems perpetrators of incipient fascism? Nonsense.
It’s hard to get a sentient human being to give you a fair hearing after issuing such baloney, particularly when many of the people making these outrageous charges are the same ones who don’t show up at the polls and blame Democrats for their own electoral defenestration.
It’s not just Republicans who have made the W. Bush years disappear.
A typical response from you.
You set-up straw men of your own choosing. Example: “Calling the sit-in Congressional Dems perpetrators of incipient fascism? Nonsense. “
And this is nearly incoherent:
“It’s hard to get a sentient human being to give you a fair hearing after issuing such baloney, particularly when many of the people making these outrageous charges are the same ones who don’t show up at the polls and blame Democrats for their own electoral defenestration.”
Any evidence that the people from the left didn’t vote.
Because the data shows liberals turned out in 2010 and in 2014 in higher proportions than the the rest of the Democratic base.
The critics from the left aren’t responsible for the disaster of 2010 and 2014.
fladem, that’s not a straw man. One of the commenters actually called the Feinstein Bill “incipient fascism.” Another called it a “POS Bill” in the middle of an exchange where commenters were considering both the multiple Bills the Democrats were trying to gain votes for and the larger strategies of conducting the sit-in. All analytic alternatives were ignored by the cynics in favor of dialing up the flamethrowing rhetoric about how horrible John Lewis and his fellow Congressmembers were, and what disappointing people we were for supporting them.
Some far left progressives, including some here at the Frog Pond, openly blame Democrats for poor turnout in midterms, saying that the policies moved by Democrats are not worth supporting in comparison to Republicans. When people with us on the left say voters shouldn’t turn out to support Democrats, I take them at their word that they aim to depress turnout.
I’m familiar with the concept of straw men. I wish this over the top, self defeating rhetoric were a whimsical creation of mine. But it’s not. People are actually on this blog lodging the claim that the winner of the Democratic POTUS primary is a horrible candidate. It’s an…interesting claim. People are actually on this blog lodging the threat that people who support Clinton will be partially responsible for a Trump victory in November. It’s infuriating.
This basically reads like a column about Nick Farage from 2 years ago.
Here is the simple truth: Around the World the left of center is failing to address income inequality. As a result the right is filling the vacuum.
So the left of center – which doesn’t really give a damn about income inequality – labels it racist or what have you.
But last night when you watched the BBC and heard interviews from Labor MP’s you realize the similarities.
At one critical juncture in the debate it was said that “people are tired of experts”. And they are – the technocrats lost credibility in the UK. And they have lost it here.
Because while the author believes “Things are better than people think” in the real world median family income is lower than it was 18 years ago.
So you can yell all you want about “teh stupid” but Dan Balz’s column in the Post was pretty spot on.
The Right is winning.
Better for who? Not I…
But why can’t people see how fundamentally, disastrously wrong-headed it is?
“The Left says it’s going to help working people by saving them from the ravages of the Right. It’s not working, so let’s support the Right instead!”
It makes no sense on a conceptual level — until you remember that the Right has been pulling this “We’re on your side…really! They’re the elites!” crap for decades.
It makes sense on an emotional level.
If neither the left nor the right “really gives a damn about income inequality,” the emotional argument wins. And the establishment left doesn’t have an emotional argument. (Sanders did; that’s why he did so well, and why the establishment left hates him, and why a certain type of analyst lashed out against ‘how is he going to enact his unicorn plans?’)
How do you show that you “give a damn” and have a proactive plan? For me, Sanders was on the mark as a kvetch, but other than “revolution” and, now, “manifesto”, I don’t see much there there. Policy please.
Extending free public education from K-12 to K-16 is one easy example.
That doesn’t help much with income inequality. The poor generally don’t make it to college, and not covering tuition is not the main cause. The main causes are things like poor school access, family financial crises, and the simple fact that you don’t need everybody to go to college. Free college mostly benefits middle and upper middle class people.
It shows you give a damn. I’m talking about making an emotional argument, and you’re translating into Vulcan!
Even if it’s merely aspirational for many Americans, it still makes sense on an emotional level. More sense than, say, the extremely effective: ‘austerity is hurting you, so let’s blame immigrants.’
If it were free, lots of poor kids would feel like they should/could go to college. And so what if more middle and upper middle class kids would benefit as well? Hard to take your argument seriously. Did you say what you meant?
A number of European countries have free college tuition and college is still overwhelmingly for middle-class and up kids. Tuition is just not a major reason poor kids don’t often get into/stay in college. The benefit from free college tuition basically goes to middle-class kids and does little to improve income inequality.
It’s a good idea, overall, but it’s not going to help with income inequality.
Yes it does help with inequality. Inequality is the gap between the 1% and everyone else. We’re talking about the loss of the middle class, and we’re talking about kids so saddled with debt after college that the American dream is a just that – a dream.
It’s not about the poor, the powers that be have safely ignored the poor for years. What makes it different this time is the shrinking middle class has finally caught on.
You cannot address globalization without addressing the trade deals that are driving it. Of those by the far the most important is the deal with China. Nafta needs to be revisited as well, but is less important.
You need a new pension system, which Sanders proposed.
You need a new Health Care System – which Sanders proposed.
You need a new Education system, which Sanders proposed.
As is typical, people who attack Sanders really don’t know what policy he proposed.
But more broadly, I am not sure what Sanders proposes. This is a HARD problem to solve. But you have to start by at least understanding it a- as opposed to denying it exists like some in the thread are doing.
I haven’t seen anyone here denying problems exist, or the need for reform. I don’t see a lot of people who attack Sanders here; I certainly don’t.
I do join others who deny that Clinton is the devil, and am denying that Clinton proposes no reforms; her campaign is proposing reforms.
Two points:
1-You quote the NY Times? On anything of real interest or import, especially anti-neolib politics? They can’t even be trusted to recommend wines. Or invasions.
2-Do you honestly think Trump scheduled this trip for his golf course!!!??? If so, I have ay number of coincidences to sell you. He scheduled it…with an adequate if somewhat transparent golf course excuse…so that he could be there when the vote went down.. If it was to leave he EU, he could make big political points crowing over his prescience and his own nationalist rhetoric; if not…then he was there for the golf course.
Duh!!!
I cannot believe how often you denigrate his considerable public relations…read “modern political”…talents. In fact, I am beginning to believe that you are doing this on purpose, because you’re no dummy yourself.
But for real or for hustle…it ain’t working, Booman.
On a year’s worth of evidence.
It just ain’t working.
Later…
AG
An exaggeration, but the point is valid. OTOH, you consistently overrate Trump’s PR skills and acumen. He’s really sort of mediocre. If he were half as good as you give him credit for, his ratings within the GOP electorate would have soared to over 50% by last November against the pathetic line-up of candidates that he was competing against.
Maybe, maybe not. His talents are not “skills and acumen” so much as flat out perfect pitch for the people he is targeting. I don;’t see him sitting down and plotting anymore than I see a truly great natural singer like Frank Sinatra or Ray Charles “studying” the songs that they sang. Sinatra didn’t have a clue about the music theory or the harmonic motion below of what he sang, and Ray was so great that he could play all the right chords on the piano and still sing notes that made emotional and musical sense but really didn’t have much to do with those chords. It’s a gift.
Trump has that gift politically…in terms of public relations, really. The great teacher of…of things not usually taught…George Gurdjieff had a phrase that he applied to certain other teachers. He called them “stupid saints.” They didn’t know how or why they did or taught things but they managed to do a credible job anyway…in their proper time and place.
Trump is like that. A “stupid candidate.”
Stupid like a fox.
AG
Not a gift, Trump apparently studied under Roy Cohn, a man that any decent leftie reviles as much today as Kissinger, Cheney, etc. And unlike your examples of Sinatra and Ray Charles, Trump hits a lot of bad and wrong notes (as Cohn also did) and then either blusters his way through or hides out until their somewhat forgotten.
In the debates, there were a couple of instances of one of his opponents hitting him hard on one of his bad notes and Trump did crumble in those moments. But for the most part his opponents lacked the skill to go after him and his bad note moments.
Miles Davis once said “There are no wrong notes.” Not as a jazz improvisor, for sure. What he meant was that if you are totally in the moment you can turn any mistake into something useful. “Good,” even…at least in the context of a given song or style.
Trump has that talent.
Bet on it.
If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have survived this long slog of a campaign as long as he has survived so far.
Bet on that as well.
AG
James Brown fined any member of his band that hit a wrong note. So, even experts disagree.
In the arts and politics there is improvisation and following the script. For actors, they have to master both on stage, big screen, small screen, and radio and comedy and drama. Not too many are up to that standard. Trump does a crude form of improv — similar to that at roasts but without the funny bits — on TV and that works for some. (Those “housewives” doing something and Honey boo-boo also works for some.)
Y’know…that James Brown story? It’s bullshit. I have worked with a lot of people who worked in that band, including two of his music directors. I’ve heard the stories first-hand and I’ve heard those musicians play both well and…sometimes…not so well. Me too. We are all human.
Brown was a total martinet and he was way too busy with his act to be cataloging the ups and downs of his musicians. If the drummer(s) and the rest of the rhythm section were making the breaks and putting out a lot of energy, past that he didn’t really give much of a shit. He mostly left the disciplining of the band to others because was too busy with his hustle. His managers and straw bosses were just this side of gangsters, and people literally got away with anything short of not showing up in costume, not making the moves onstage and not staying away from his harem.
And asking for more money, of course.
Just sayin’…don’t believe what you see in the movies.
They lie.
AG
Then go call these former members of Brown’s band liars.
Don’t know how often he fined a musician for hitting a wrong note (the musicians probably rarely did that), but he Brown was known to fine his musicians for anything Brown thought was unacceptable. Fred Wesley:
That’s martinet shit, Marie. Not “mistakes.” Just another super-talented jerk, running his or her game. I’ve played with too many of them not to know the difference.
AG
Even when Trump crumbles, it plays into the “You can’t stop watching the train wreck.” logic.
His value proposition runs something like this: Neither party has made your lives better because they won’t stand up to the people who are competing against you (Mexicans) or causing your sons and daughters to serve in wars (Muslims). I will do something about both of these if elected and what will elect me is the opposition focusing on the train wreck and not where my support is coming from. I will take you seriously; no one else will. Vote Trump.
It is of course a fabrication of convenience; even Trump is curious about how far he can go. Ignoring the distraction, proposing concrete, simple-to-understand policy that can be easily held accountable could shut down his appeal.
But modern political consultants are incapable of that sort of creativity. So we get the roll-out of previous ways of doing things, except for how to get rid of that pesky Bernie Sanders. (OK, Bernie, we tried a sit-in; it didn’t work.) Business as usual rolls on.
Ah, Tarheel,I so enjoy your posts (no snark). The sit-in did work; it just didn’t work magic. As I watched hour upon hour, I thought: There are some ballsy folks, not just on the floor using Periscope, but at C-SPAN and other outlets, showing the Dems trying to do something, at least. Not since Donald Trump has TV given up so much free airtime.
I agree that the consultants can’t come up with a concrete simple-to-understand policy. That has been the domain of the likes of Frank Luntz and Sarah Palin. Democrats always want “comprehensive.” It is our downfall. The policies make sense, but they’re so darn hard to explain. What’s the way around that. It is what distinguishes us from the “drill baby drill” party, from the “death panels” party, from the “right to work” party. C’mon. You’re smart. Help out here!
The sit-in did not do what it could have done because it did not last long enough to build inside-the-chamber/outside the Capitol connections that were forming from the people outside. I don’t know whether that was because of Ryan suddenly deciding to call the session back to order and slamming through some motions or strategic failures of the sit-in itself. The event was never imagined as an inside-outside tactic to put pressure on Ryan the way the Madison protests and the Democratic Senators operated with some degree of understanding how the two meshed together.
If you declare #NoBillNoBreak, you set the goal by which success is judged and you better deliver it. How is it that the GOP House is denied a break?
It appears that Congressional Dems are organizing to resume the sit-in if necessary when the House returns.
What are we talking about during this House break? Gun control Bills that are supported by 80%+ of Americans, Bills fought for by Democrats in an unprecedented manner.
The sit-in has been effective.
We’ve been talking about gun control for 40 years. Joe Sudbury argues that the most important accomplishment of the sit-in is that some Democrats inside the beltway no longer think that the NRA is invincible.
Given the House obstruction, let’s see how far they push the sit-in when they come back and it is more likely to be dismissed by the media as a political stunt in an election year rather than actual pressure on cracking the House GOP strike.
The fact remains that Democratic follow-through on momentum from inside-outside direct action, such as even the Madison WI occupation has tended to dissipate it to the point of failure. Scott Walker was not recalled because he had national muscle behind him and the pro-recall people were left hanging with what they could build within the state.
Sudbury is correct. Even the LBGT momentum was almost derailed by fearful inside-the-beltway Democratic elected officials and consultants.
And there is no third way on gun control (and likely on immigration rights as well). The 80% who want some form of gun control must get out and show the loud 20% that they have lost the issue. That means that a lot of Republicans who care a whit about gun control must be single-issue voters in this election–at the Congressional level. NRA support must be vote-killer, not a vote-enhancer. In every single district. That requires a challenger willing to make that case and make it boldly and strongly and stand up to the gun bullies.
And that must happen most of all in gun manufacturing states. Connecticut, Tennessee, North Carolina, Alabama, especially. Especially the manufacturer of AR-15 style weapons, Glock, and Smith & Wesson.
The issue that these corporate officials don’t care whether they kill innocent people is a potent one that needs to be raised. But some Democrats are too fearful and too “nice” to raise it. Enabling murderers and criminals should not be anyone’s idea of a good job.
Actually, no, we haven’t just been talking about it. There actually was a President that passed meaningful gun control in the form of the Brady Bill.
Bill Clinton.
Clinton and his first Congress also passed a Federal ban on semi-automatic assault weapons which was discontinued during the W. Bush Administrated by a Republican-controlled Congress.
It’s not to his credit or anything, but Trump is a good, old-fashioned bloviator. It’s exciting. He spews out crap and everyone listens just like most of us wish we could and they would (and fuck I wish I had the money he says he’s got). If I were in the mind to just blow it all up, I’d vote for him. I plan now to vote for Jill Stein, I guess, ’cause anyway Hillary’s going to win (though that 6 point margin right now is slim).
When I heard he was going to Scotland the day after the referendum I assumed he didn’t want to be seen as meddling but wanted to capitalize on the outcome. The fates decreed that the outcome gave him grist for his mill. The golf course is just another distraction of his. In fact, he’s mimicking Barack Obama’s vist to the UK though, you might say, in reverse. He’s not sort of mediocre, he’s completely so, but no one can accuse him of not being opportunistic. Bernie Sanders is going to vote for Hillary Clinton I heard. Can you imagine. Now BooMan will but in and opine, ‘Do you think he would vote for Trump?’
Yes, he does have that opportunistic nose. But that’s standard issue for a demagogue.
He’s the whites’ Obama.
Dear god. If Trump had one-tenth the acumen you ascribe, he wouldn’t have made the trip at all, and certainly not to Scotland. That boner alone made for some pretty humiliating news items about him, and the sight of a neighbor of his golf course flying a Mexican flag on a very high pole.
This in turn led to a story about how Trump had built a wall to block this neighbor’s view of the golf course, and then billed the neighbor for it. The neighbor told him to go fuck himself and, of course, didn’t pay.
Yeah. Really bright idea to go to Scotland.
Good thing Trump isn’t running for anything in Scotland and doesn’t have any new deals in the works there. As he basically said that the voters in Scotland are stupid. (Although I doubt he bothered to look beyond the top line of the election results and therefore, doesn’t know that Scotland was solidly and strongly in the Remain camp. Of course, that ignorance only reinforces my perception that he’s a rather stupid man.)
BBC – James Cook responds to Trump’s Just arrived in Scotland. Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back. No games!
Donald Trump couldn’t care to figs about the mood in Scotland because his supporters back in the Homeland can’t tell Scotland from a hole in the ground. It is about him. Always. I should add that both Clintons have a strong streak of narcissism too, right now the Misses more than the Mister who will get back into form when she lets him out of the stable to run around the White House. I hope they don’t inadvertently take any Landmark furniture when they leave this time.
Of course it’s always about him, but for narcissists to succeed they have to read the mood of their audience. Otherwise, they end up on street corner spouting nonsense that others ignore.
Trump keeps blowing off his hideously wrong public statements, but that only works well with his true believers and their numbers aren’t that large. He’d probably get more attention and support at home if he openly mocked people in foreign countries. As it is, he just appears stupid and lame which is always fodder for comedians.
They’re going wild over the vote but not in the manner he assumes…
I hope that Trump is right about Americans taking their country back. That would mean that the GOP would suffer devastation in Congress and legislatures.
Doubt he and his supporters view those words the same way you do.
Always the difference between reality and Trump’s reality.
So, reading through … and seems like a lot of “don’t underestimate” etc… but I fail to see what the Dems could/should do to “help the working man” in this era. In effect, it has been since Reagan took down the air traffic controllers or the Republicans demonized the post office, that unions have been shattering. The times have changed, long before anyone thought to use the term “neoliberal” (which I’m so sick of). A copy like IBM (near where I used to live) would hire a guy (mostly) out of high school, train him, match his contributions to charity, pay for health insurance, and on and on. It was a job for life. Then in the 70’s they took all that away. In fact, one friend who worked there had to train his replacement in Brazil so they could outsource his work.
So what have the Democrats done since, especially under Obama? Health care (not perfect but improved); increase in earned income tax credit; lower taxes generally; auto industry bail-out (hundreds of thousands of jobs); moves toward equal pay for women; increased minimum wages for federal workers; overtime for federal workers; you fill in the rest.
The ability to ship goods all over the world, and into the US from everywhere, was a trend back when Japan was making everything we invented. To put all the blame on NAFTA or the Clintons is just false. (Now I gave you all a line from which to make a pull-quote.)
How do you convince folks (as a Democrat) that commerce in the world has changed. It has made some things better (a 50 inch TV for $600). And it has caused some pain. But nowhere near the pain of the Great Depression. And not because of any number of POC coming into the country.
I’m asking for ideas. Convincing arguments for on the trail. Practical ideas.
Ideas for how to convince folks that global commerce is here to stay, and their lives won’t be as secure as they’d hoped?
The problem was in the expectations. They keep getting conned into thinking that government is the problem, and then they want government to satisfy their expectations. How to do that? As for free education K-16, we have a pretty big problem getting many people’s kids through 12, no less 16. How about making K-12 more productive? So many don’t need college but they do need some good skills and they can be taught those through grade 12. And then, with business, train even further. It isn’t necessary for the government to give a blanket free ride (unless you’re willing to start sorting kids out at age 10 — racism, racism!!!!)
Where I will agree is in the goal that no one who wants to go to college should be prohibited from that because of money. The cost of college could go down, a lot. And interest on loans for college should be ZERO and repayable in part by public service.
I don’t think Trump afficiandos are so concerned about their kids in college anyhow.
Free education K-16 isn’t problematic. What is problematic is the expectation that K-12 is focused on sitting still, obeying instructions, doing unfamiliary stuff in competition with folks for whom it is familiar, requiring homework that must be taken home to environments of varying degrees of abstraction and family help, and having no motivation to learn but people’s insistence that you need it for a job. And then you see people who make a point of saying, “I became sucessful and I didn’t get a high school (or college) education.”
The idea of a liberal education (and that was what the poor benighted schoolmarms of the early 20th century were peddling) was an education that allowed for freedom in an increasingly stratified economy.
But to get the money for public schools, the schoolmarms had to convince the Mr. GotRocks of the practical value for money people of an educated population. Thus trade schools to train future textile workers or farm schools to train future farmers got support from wealthy folks and local governments that never bought into liberal education.
We need more than ever that notion of being able to think for oneself and not be intimidated by any form of information that those schoolmarms often gave people. My dad went to a one-room school for seven years, a high school for five. He went from working on a tenant cotton farm to a professional career as a result of something that that teacher in that one-room school did while he was there.
I think we know how to make K-12 education a success but politically it is hung on the issue of desegregation and white Anglo privilege hiding behind the complaint about multiculturalism.
The terminology “blanket free ride” is not something I ever thought I would hear from a Democrat.
The best thing is not to sort or to track but let kids choose. A junior high near here has a biotechnology program — ostensibly a trade program to train a range from biotech technicians through a little more informed landscapers. The approach is practical. Students have turned the courtyard into a practical agricultural area; they are identifying the plants on campus; they are building and studying habitats by a stream on campus. They are engaging in more hands-on activity in this one class; the other technology classes are doing the same hands-on activities. Kids choose which technology class to take.
Discipline problems are declining and motivation to learn math, science, and language arts is increasing.
The school still has to deal with nutritional and family issues. The nutritional issue is addressed with the kids growing some supplementary food to what the school provides and learning about nutrition.
Education is a public infrastructure. It should not be rationed on the basis of ability to pay. If business wants certain skills, it should be a direct cost of training to them and not an externalized cost on society. It is businesses who have been freeloading on the notion that education is about job preparation.
From the public’s view, public education should be about equipping people to adapt to rapidly changing environments, sort complicated public issues, and be able to hold public officials accountable. That requires general liberal education skills and a substantial background set of scientific, legal, and technical knowledge.
The investment in education is recaptured in generalized prosperity (not financial wealth) in society that provides incentives for students to learn in the next generation.
Don’t stereotype Trump supporters. Some are very concerned about their kids getting into college. In fact, introducing this into a discussion about working people or the working class (to use the pollsters’ category) and education derails the actual policy discussion about education.
Where people are not interested in public education, it is either because of ethnic or economic exclusiveness (or segregation). The actual form of education has little to do with it. There are nostalgia for phonics, the Pledge of Allegiance, the 3Rs, the old math, but those are generally abstractions to cover for the “I don’t want my kids to got to school with those people because they might like them” issues.
Traffic:
That’s what the corporatocracy seeks from the educational system: a reliable supply of maximally interchangeable “tiny cogs in one big wheel”, at no cost to them.
There’s a big difference between age 18 when most end K-12 and beyond that where the question of supporting yourself begins for most Americans. College teaches skills, if that’s the track a student chooses, so, you know, free college wouldn’t rule out the opportunity for young adults to learn them.
Why not invest in the future of more young people rather than maintaining such low tax rates for the wealthy? Why so stingy?
But Government actually is the problem.
It allowed Wall Street to get away with collapsing the economy, bailed it out, and then made sure Wall Street got richer.
And that was bi-partisan. Bailing out GM was, by the way, a Bush idea.
It signed trade deals – again the deal with China is by far the most important – and watched as a third of all manufacturing jobs disappeared in 15 years. Those jobs, many of which were union, have been replaced by non-union service jobs with no benefits.
The cost of University Education – basically a must have to compete in a global economy – has exploded, fueled by student loans. A generation is now in a form of indentured servitude. The cost of Health Care has exploded. Obamacare is a good thing, but the cost of a system that is at least 1/3 higher than any other system in the world imposes costs that are unsustainable in the longer term.
All of this speaks to a poverty that exists in the US infrastructure – and which Democrats accept passively.
So what do the Democrats have to say to people who make less than the used to, and have less security than they once did.
Is it, well, tough?
Thank your for this great comment.
Excellent question.
In fact, there are some areas as bad off as during the Great Depression. Those areas tend to compound their miser by voting in Republicans on culture war issues. In those areas, the people who are not government workers envy those who are and the GOP stokes that envy.
Globalization is something that has been promoted by US businesses since World War II when they thought that it was win-win (and in a way it was until other countries rebuilt). Now it is an excuse for the emergence of corporate feudalism and ever farther extension of the US military in service to a certain number of corporations.
When the economy was booming, corporations were happy to use hiring of black labor and Latino labor as conspicuous ways of breaking organized labor. Rank-and-file labor took the bait and deserted to the GOP on culture war grounds. That is what allowed the destruction of organized labor. And that was accelerated by changes in legislation (beginning with Taft-Hartley) that stripped labor of the free right to organize. Restoring the rights to organize that existed prior to the end of World War II and the institutional power to defend those rights against multi-billion-dollar corporations would be a good step although hated by most current workers, who have had organized labor bad-mouthed (often rightly) for a generation. A part of this is reformation of labor leadership so that selling out rank-and-file in order to gain wealth, power, and status does not continue to occur.
Restoration of earned pension benefits lost through corporate reorganizations and arbitrary changes of plans would help a lot of retired workers who were royally screwed by their employers (including Mitt Romney) and deserve justice. You need an aggressive Congress to do this, but those stolen pension funds buttressed the fortunes of the billionaires who engineered the deals; Carl Icahn is a poster child for many of the stolen pension deals. A highly progressive income tax with no loopholes could recapture some of this. A extremely high (almost confiscatory) estate tax with a reasonable exclusion (say $10 million) could recapture even more. The test of a good bill would be how many tax lawyers, tax advisors, and tax accountants become unemployed.
Restoring fiscal policy as the means of acting counter-cyclically in the economy would regenerate an economy of steady jobs and income that would stimulate the very sectors that working folks work in. There is a huge amount of deferred maintenance in infrastructure, and there are critical infrastructure project like refurbishing water supply piping (Flint MI in particular) resulting from the race to the bottom on all taxes.
“No new taxes.” has been especially lucrative for the 1% and especially catastrophic for everyone else, especially those who do not have offshore tax avoidance capabilities. Time to figure out what it is that keeps the reality of this issue from not surfacing in a way that voters understand.
A ten-year program of the US government acting as the employer of last resort and providing both job training and dealing with employability issues in rapidly changing job markets would work unemployment out of the market and bring people in off dead-end public assistance mechanisms. Wise management (is this possible anymore) of such programs could subsidize introductions of new job categories and careers (if “career” is even a viable concept any more). The most obvious area of jobs for this is climate-change mitigation projects. This is the modern form of the Civilian Conservation Corps. There are going to be jobs for specialized form of landscapers, trail builders, wildlife migration structure construction, adaptive agriculture workers, and other jobs that no one really knows how to do well but people could grow into, just as the CCC grew people into wildlife commission workers, forest service workers, state parks workers, and so on.
Commerce in the world changed because transportation became cheap with cheap oil. To the extent that oil is still subsidized we are killing our climate and our economy at the same time. No wonder it is the oil companies who most want to reach the working class with their propaganda.
Given the chance, American workers could make a 50-inch TV for $600, could distribute the goods and services that local people really need and want better than Walmart, and could have an economy less sensitive to global disruption. The tax codes and preferentially empowerment of large corporations embedded in US law do not give them that chance.
But from a messaging standpoint, Democrats have to recycle Reagan’s promises of prosperity under total deregulation and show where each and every one of the conservative nostrums from supply-side economics to strong defense, to deregulation, to freedom from unions, to free trade has demonstrably failed to arrest the slide that caused them to vote Jimmy Carter out. And the environmental and energy crises have gotten much worse even as we squander the fossil fuels savings account in order to preserve the illusion of a global economy.
And from a messaging standpoint, it is time to take seriously Chris Hayes’s insights in The Twilight of the Elites because the dysfunctions he identifies there is what working people understand from elite media that Democrats are.
TV, magazines, local newspapers, and church and cafe gossip shape working class opinion, Those who go on the internet slip into the social media channels of their already existing comfortable sources of information, which to some degree locks in their opinions more than they would be before the internet. But a lot of those channels are more tightly tied to particular political alliances, especially the Republican Party, that was before the internet. Finding which channels can provide a break to the seamless propaganda is the challenge.
A Democrat should not be supporting any of the upcoming partnership agreements, created in previous administrations and in fealty to large corporations.
The best move a Democrat to do right now is to announce that they were opposed to those agreements and tell exactly why. They are a wash at producing US jobs, but give corporations more privileges that allow them profit and power. The implications of patents and copyright provisions go beyond the hi-tech and media industry, although the zombie intellectual property issue is killing the ability to do independent research. Especially with documents from the 1900s-1970s of now-deceased authors. Especially when a corporation (even a university press) can exert ownership. That is a working class issue to the extent that independent innovators and inventors could create disruptive products. It is also a problem in that it allows for the use of patents to inflate pharmaceutical prices indefinitely.
Commerce in the world has not changed. The international slave trade still exists. Economic colonies still ship commodities to the metropolitan regions and buy finished goods. The cost of transportation still favors water-transport when time is not an isssue, and time becomes an issue for perishable goods and high-value/low weight goods for imperious consumers. Bankers still do the functional equivalent of shaving coins. Bankruptcy is still the way to riches (for the clever). The joint-stock-company is still the way to fund your crazy scheme with other people’s money (and little of your own).
Because the pain is not as widespread as that of the Great Depression does not mean that it is not as intensely experienced. The agricultural depression of the 1920s was what my parents’ families experienced during the Roaring Twenties; it was brutal, especially in overproduced cotton and tobacco markets. That did not end until the additional demand from the New Deal incomes increased demand for smokes and clothing. This area was solidly behind FDR because of that.
The retrenchment from that began with the 1946 election. We are now as far away from FDR’s policies that benefited the working class as could be imagined. Look at the murals of the WPA projects of the 1930s. In local post offices over the US, farmers and all sorts of workers shown at work. When was the last public art that honored a nurses aide, or a cashier, or wait staff or other worker? No, those images now of work are for pain relievers, feature stereotypes of workers and work, and are a part of class-stratified advertising.
The Clintons did not invent the rush to globalization; in some respect, the rush of liberal thought toward global interdependence as an alternative to war did that, or at least primed an audience. The Clintons did not invent NAFTA or the notion “free trade” that NAFTA represented nor did they invent maquiladora manufacturing or agricultural impoverishment. But as President, Bill Clinton led efforts to ratify NAFTA, and NAFTA resulted in the collapse of several important industries as corporations offshored their operations, first to Mexico and then almost immediately afterwards to China. Not the Clintons but US corporations created the disinvestment in US manufacturing and the stripping of community after community of its jobs.
The first step toward rebuilding a relationship with the working class is a mea culpa. A failure to take seriously what some critics of NAFTA were telling them, a rush by the proponents of NAFTA, some of whom were key contributors to the Clinton campaign. And a whole bunch of subsequent events that compounded the foreseen and unforeseen consequences of NAFTA.
And then a sober assessment of the world economy as it appears to US workers.
A description of what conservatives have told them for 40 years. A conclusion that “that path has failed” and “I halfway believed it myself for a while.”
And then full-throated opposition to the current partnership agreements and why. And why Democrats should not support them. Essentially, they should not provide cover for disastrous Republican policies.
Thanks, TarHeel. You’re so well-informed and erudite that I blush with embarrassment. Would be nice to sit for a long while and exchange ideas.
And I really appreciate the long post which I’ll have to re-read a few times to take it all in.
But right now I have to leave for my state’s convention to choose delegates to Philly.
Choose wisely. Choose well.
Median family income peaked 20 years ago.
You can’t convince them things are better
Because they aren’t
The Clinton types have no answer for this.
Do I have as much money to buy things as I did twenty years ago? No. Can I get better things for less money? Yes, I can. Can I afford the best medical care? No. Is the medical care I do have access to saving more lives? Yes, it is. Have we ended bigotry? No. Do minorities have more rights than they did? Yes. Have we ended warfare? No. Has the number of people dying in wars gone down? Yes. Is it hard to uncover facts? Yes. Why? Because I have the history of the whole damn human race and access to all information in a little box in my pocket, and sometimes it’s overwhelming, but it’s also a freaking miracle, that’s why!
Who was better off twenty years ago? White men. Most of the rest of us appreciate what we have gained in those decades. That’s why Clinton is going to win. And now you have an answer from a Clinton type.
Don’t be a bully. We are delicate flowers.
.
tb92 is a white guy with a job doing ok. He’s rightly fairly impressed with progress that allows him to feel a little better about the fact that he’s got a nephew that’s gay and a neighbor a couple of blocks / subdivisions / miles over that’s black. He’s got a phone and a laptop. He’s good.
Of course he’s not a bully, like you say. Stupid, yes; but not a bully.
As a delicate flower, I would know.
Innocent sarcasm. The most despicable kind. Maybe you’re projecting.
Actually I’m a stay at home mom. I spent a year on welfare when I was younger, and saw what an amazing benefit a good education was for surviving in that system. I have daughters of child-bearing age, and worry every day about what would happen if they lost their right to control their own bodies, but I’m grateful every day for the fact that they live in a time when their career options are not limited. I have a son who gets dark enough in the summer that I worry about him going to the park by himself. We chose a high school for them that is highly integrated. I’ve had to explain to them how to act if a cop pulls them over when they are with their black friends. My daughter spent last night at the home of a trans friend, and is putting together a program to reduce the stigma of mental illness in the school for her senior project. I’m in a long term poly relationship with both a man and a woman, and have had child protective services called on us because someone didn’t like our lifestyle.
I do have a phone and a laptop, and I LOVE the science that allows that to happen. And I am white. Other than that, you are wrong on every count. You are also awfully judgmental for a liberal. Maybe you’re projecting.
Listen tb92, people who consider themselves more liberal and more progressive than you are always right. About everything.
Which means that you’re a liar about being a female. Or something.
Also:
Why do you hate America?
Is it because of your “satisfaction with the mediocrity of your life”?
Or: How TrueProgressivesTM are now moral scolds just like the Tea Party Patriots they claim to abhor.
I wonder if Sanders knows just how much his own f̶a̶n̶a̶t̶i̶c̶s̶ supporters are tarnishing what Sanders was trying to accomplish with their self-righteousness.
It’s that they think they’re more progressive because they value monetary issues over my rights that I find exasperating. I’m being scolded for wanting equality even if it doesn’t pay well. What the hell?
Reminds me of my college days, when we were protesting the Vietnam War, and oh! the righteousness of fighting the good leftist fight! Except, if us wimmenfolks started bringing up women’s issues we were told to shut up and stop distracting from what really mattered.
It’s great there is enough income in your family to support having a stay at home Mom.
That is harder now than it was.
Things are way better for me personally now than they were. My child attends an elite university that had a significant endowment. So I make enough to cover the difference in the cost, and he will graduate with no debt. I have no problem affording the best medical care. My retirement is secure – I am one of the few that actually has a pension. I have no worry about my job being offshored.
But that is not the experience of most people. In the real world retirement has become a joke as pension plans were turned into 401 K’s. Most of the young are trapped in student loans. People are much less secure in their jobs, and if you don’t have an education finding a job that you can raise a family on is difficult.
The percentage of those over 65 with a job is increasing significantly, in part because of the destruction of private pensions.
You seem mad at the idea that living standards have declined. Yet for the average person this is objectively so.
Why pointing this out somehow minimizes the problems of race in this country is beyond me. As someone who represents on a pro-bono basis the mentally ill in their commitment hearings I am more than familiar with the stigma of mental illness, and of the inadequate resources that exist to treat it.
I have more than a few gay friends (most who came of age in Vermont do) who have benefited enormously from the revolution in gay rights. It is important their rights be protected, along with reproductive rights.
Income inequality is not the only political fight worth fighting.
And yet as Brexit shows increasing economic insecurity is a toxin that infects everything around it. People over time become angry and less tolerant.
Which is why it is so important.
“Income inequality is not the only political fight worth fighting.”
Exactly. It’s important, absolutely, but I’m sick of people pretending that it’s all that matters. For those of us whose lives are immeasurably better because the Democrats have fought for our rights, it is horrifying to hear so many so that all that work isn’t relevant.
What are these “better things for less money” that you speak of?
The first electric drip coffee maker I had lasted several years. The next one not as many years. The next one three years. The last one a year and a half. That’s when I returned to using my now thirty-five year old Milita drip pot. Yes, the cost of those electric coffee makers did decline over those years, but suspect that when lifetime of the pot was factored in the price was the same, and if the use of raw materials and disposal were factored in, the ultimate cost of the cheapest coffee maker is the most expensive.
I have a 54 inch television in my home. I got it for fifty bucks at a thrift store. My car gets double the gas mileage that my old one did, and has safety features I only dreamed of. My washing machine runs on pennies and takes half the time. My IKEA bookshelves may not be works of art, but I can afford to cover entire walls with them. My kids can play video games, listen to music, read books, and watch movies on their telephones. If I’m worried about them, I can track them down by GPS. My husband works on the patio because his computer is the size of a large book and runs off of wireless internet. If he needs a new part, he can have it delivered to the house, from China, often for only a few dollars. The patio itself is made of this brilliant material that requires no maintenance and will last my lifetime. The…
Shall I go on? Science and engineering have given us an endless number of gifts in the last few decades. It’s a shame to not appreciate them.
No — recycled thrift store bargains don’t count. Neither do technological changes or production economies of scale (prototypes are always very pricey compared to full production runs regardless of where the product is manufactured). Otherwise there would be no end to the claim-game of better and cheaper.
Why were you driving such a low gas mileage car before your current one? (The safety features are tech.) However, your claim was that you can purchase more for less and not that the operating costs of your new purchases are less.
Modern kitchen/laundry appliances aren’t rated to last as many years are those in the past. So again, cheaper leads to more frequent replacements. And each replacement requires additional raw materials and lots of energy.
Is the Ikea bookcase today better and cheaper than it was thirty years ago? Of course not. May be the same quality (although the wood veneers don’t look quite as nice to me) and the price has increased in accordance with general inflation rates.
Fun with phones — again tech. But there’s no way those phones are cheaper either to purchase or use than landline phones of thirty years ago.
Patios should last several lifetimes, but what that has to do with your “better and cheaper” claim is bizarre.
There’s a huge difference between claiming “better and cheaper” and “really like new tech gizmos” that have become cheaper now that we’re beyond the prototype phase and production has been off-shored to cheap labor countries.
I have much better stuff and I pay less for it. Play semantics games all you like. I’m going to keep being grateful for what the science of the last few decades has given us.
You still haven’t provided any examples that would qualify as better and cheaper. All you’re saying is that you have lots of stuff that you like that came with a cheap sticker price because it was made in a cheap labor factory abroad.
Some things actually don’t get better because they are already very good and nobody can come up with better. As I’ve never been a fan of having lots of stuff, I’ve always focused on quality. In part because it works/looks better and in part because it lasts longer (excluding electronic stuff). I also like things that can be repaired. Using that criteria, quality today isn’t cheaper, if one can find it.
Many of us can have things now that we couldn’t have before. That makes our lives better. If it’s not your thing, that’s fine. But it matters to us. I’m done now.
with this viewpoint (which goes hand-in-hand with . . . probably even requires . . . the mostly unquestioned/unexamined Gospel of Perpetual Economic Growth):
Going at least back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, all that material/technological “progress” you’re so pleased with has required massive spending-down of our inherited “natural capital”.
This includes obvious things like extracting and then expending non-renewable mineral/fossil-fuel deposits. It also includes the many less-recognized effects of all that industrialization on global ecosystems, of which probably zero remain intact, undegraded. The most dangerous of these effects is probably the destruction/impairment of the resilience by which ecosystems recover from disturbance. The loss of “ecosystem services” (clean water from intact forests is probably the best known, most “graspable” of these, though the list is endless) is another frequently unaccounted-for cost of putting that computer in your back pocket. It almost goes without saying that climate change is in this category as well.
An understandable analogy is the ideal promoted by financial advisors (though far beyond the reach of the 99%): accumulate enough capital that you can leave it untouched, living entirely on the interest from it. We evolved onto an Earth with a vast, accumulated store of “natural capital”. But our dominant culture (not “humanity”), rather than living sustainably off the “interest” (e.g., natural productivity and ecosystem services) from that natural capital, has for centuries (at least) instead been living high-on-the-hog by rapaciously spending it down.
Those chickens are coming home to roost.
Over the past half-century or so, these effects have been manifesting themselves with ever-increasing frequency and magnitude, but still gradually enough to allow business-as-usual attitudes to prevail for the most part, with only a bit of tweaking here and there around the margins of some problems that wouldn’t stay ignorable. That’s changing as catastrophes/disturbances get ever harder to explain away as just normal variability, and social impacts like the European migration crisis and terrorism play out. With what we’ve seen so far still just relatively mild harbingers of the developing shit-storm.
Shorter me: I don’t think you’re fully accounting for all the actual costs (including, i.e., costs beyond the $ you personally paid out) of those phones, teevees, etc. (This is a fundamental and pervasive problem from the outset with how economic analyses are generally done, making distorted/invalid conclusions inevitable.)
I don’t mean to pick on you personally. You share the view you’ve been expressing with (I presume) literally billions of others.
That’s the problem.
And I’m fascinated by how much attention you’re giving to the “stuff” while ignoring the social improvements we’ve made.
What social improvements are you speaking of?
Well, I can get married. And when I go to visit my family in Alabama I see mixed race couples in public and they don’t even get looks.
But really, even if I didn’t have anything but bad coffeemakers, I would still prefer a world where gay people can marry and the President can be black or female. We have come so far, and I love it.
And exactly why is addressing income inequality and supporting gay rights mutually exclusive?
I never said it was. It is the people who are pretending that financial issues are all that matters that are saying that. Life can be better in many ways even if you aren’t making as much money as you did twenty years ago.
identify even one of those people?
re(obviously!):
Cuz absent that, you look to be debating a strawperson here.
Expectations breed disappointments. Right?
Glad all is well with you. Maybe you’re doing so well what with better things and lives saved and gay rights and lower war death tolls by your reckoning and facts you’ve got at your fingertips that you could stop shitting your satisfaction with the mediocrity of your life all over the rest of us.
You are SO winning arguments against Trump authoritarians and your fellow libruuls by telling us just how much better your life is, what with our mediocre piece of shit existence and expectations, unlike your noble and worthy life expectations.
Protip: the reason progressives who aren’t as self-righteous as yourself are often able to get points across to less progressive people, is because we don’t start off by telling the less-progressive mediocre-living scumbag that they should shut up and let us tell them how to be a much better human being with much better life expectations.
Or, continue shouting at clouds while the rest of us slowly but surely accomplish things you consider incremental and hence, immaterial.
What is telling in your response is how quickly you change the subject to race. It is like a reflex with Clinton types.
Since 1999 productivity has gone up about 35%. The entirety of that gain has gone to the rich.
And so to avoid dealing with this fact you hide behind some bizarre race argument, when in fact the same forces eroding white income are eroding African American income.
You are in denial.
Basically your response is well technology is better? But pray tell why should this have been accompanied by a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich?
Median family income incorporates CPI – which in turn accounts for improvements in goods.
I don’t agree with you about the number of wars – since we weren’t involved in an unending war in the Middle East since 1999, but whatever.
Exactly. Since Bill left office things have gone to pot. How is this an indictment of Clinton’s policies?
So…you’re chronicling the fact that median family income peaked during the Clinton Administration.
Whoops?
Yep, things got a lot worse once Clinton left office so we don’t want a Clinton in office. Logic, how does it work?
And by accident I am sure in 1999 we signed the MFN deal with China and de-regulated Wall Street.
Are you going to claim Clinton was responsible for the boom of the 90’s?
Very few will agree with you.
Whoops?
Yeah, Clinton raised taxes on the rich and the minimum wage. Those were big factors in the 90’s boom. That’s part of why I’m so excited about Hillary getting elected, if we can get her a Democratic Congress, because she wants to raise taxes on the rich and the minimum wage.
Wages for men without a college degree peaked in the early 1970s.
Median household income for those 65 and older peaked in 2014.
Do think we should be careful in using household income for historical comparisons because what constitutes a household isn’t static. For example, through at least the mid-1970s, most employed young people lived on their own and not with their parents and the percentage of married women that were employed was much lower. In 1970, women accounted for 43% of the labor force and 40% were employed. By 2000 women were 60% of the labor force and 57.5% were employed.
Yes, we must busy ourselves divvying up the population in order to obfusgate the fact that overall median income peaked during the terrible, terrible Clinton Administration.
I smell an obligatory “median income peaked entirely due to bad, bad Clinton policies” coming.
Bill Clinton was far from a great President, but he was far from a bad President as well. I know very well your conclusions here and how you arrive at them, Marie3; I just disagree.
I DON’T care what you think. The data you choose to use and your analysis of it are always deeply flawed and biased.
For the nth time, don’t respond to may comments. Find someone else to pick your nits with.
What causes you to believe you can order me around?
As is evident from looking at any comments thread in recent months, I’ve largely responded to your request. But we’re in a community here. You don’t get to take unlimited free shots without response.
If you’re going to dish it out, expect responses. Unilateral disengagement will not be granted to you.
Self-righteous fury, mixed with the fact that you and I have no ethics or morals because we don’t think Hitlery Clinton is as bad as Strongman Trump.
You said this:
It’s stupid. That’s why. Look it up.
Because you don’t respond in any real way.
You complain that people use “right wing themes” to attack Clinton.
And when substance is provided, you shift ground. You really don’t engage in serious argument.
Okay, I have to say: Trump kicking Cameron’s corpse is pretty funny. Not on the level of him wrecking Jeb!’s shit, but pretty funny.
Why Black Voters Are the Most Rational Voters of 2016
While portions of the white electorate go mad over Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, black voters remain cautious skeptics.
Charles D. Ellison
BY: CHARLES D. ELLISON
Posted: May 24, 2016
Let’s face it. Black voters are about the only folks in 2016 who haven’t lost their damn minds.
Contrary to some nimble-minded pop-culture notions that either we’re not politically sharp or we don’t care about elections or we just vote for people who look like us, black voters (for the most part) are a rather strategically sound bunch. But that’s because the stakes are always ever so high for us. There’s little margin for error, little wiggle room when the wrong people are put in power. When election outcomes go south–or, in our case, symbolically Deep South–we can’t accept it because we’re so busy mentally preparing to pull our political rip cords on a proverbial parachute.
We’re not simply jumping out of a crashing national plane, so to speak (because where else can we go, considering our statistical lack of social mobility, anyway?). Yet we do suddenly find ourselves escalating communitywide survival mode.
When the nation’s political condition hits the fan, it predictably hits us first. In recent polls, we can see the sharp differences between rising, practical black anxiousness and the largely distressing white callousness over just how high the stakes are. When YouGov asked (pdf) likely voters last week if they could understand why someone would vote for Donald Trump, nearly 70 percent of African Americans couldn’t grasp it. Yet 60 percent of whites could see why (along with, interestingly enough, 35 percent of Latinos, nearly double the percentage of blacks polled).
Britain allowed its populist right to rise. America should heed the warning
Richard Wolffe
…This is what happened to the British Tories as they struggled through two decades of a rising and rebellious anti-European faction. We’ve been watching the Republican party do the same with the emerging Tea Partiers and Trumpers over the same period
In London, Conservative leaders tried to co-opt extremists instead of pushing their far-right Euro rebels to join the UK Independence Party. David Cameron’s pre-election promise to hold an EU referendum was a colossal miscalculation designed to appease his own extremists. That short-term tactic led his own country to economic crisis and ended his career.
In Washington, congressional Republicans thought the Tea Party’s anti-establishment and anti-corporate spirit was fine to ignore as long they helped undermine President Obama.
Instead of ejecting them to join a third party, they embraced them, including their conspiracy theories about the president’s birth and religion. Now, after alternately ignoring and ridiculing Trump, they are shocked that the leader of the birther conspiracy is their nominee. The GOP’s short-term appeasement has imperiled its own future.
…why is Hillary Clinton only 6 points ahead of this guy. Stinks to high heaven. Trumps an idiot, sure. What does that make Hillary?
The latest national poll has her up about 13, and that number should increase as more Bernie supporters realize the primary is over, and people get a chance to see her in action. http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/6/24/1542257/-Clinton-Leads-Trump-by-13-Points-in-Reuters-Ipsos
-Poll
No. HuffPo pollster tonight shows her only 6 points ahead. I was surprised, too. Were I concerned I’d have gone to cherry-pick a more favorable recent poll, like you did, but their aggregate is up-to-date. Only 6 points ahead of an idiot. Question stands. What does that make Hillary?
(If she were 13 points ahead, I guess that’d be 43% Trump to 56% Hillary, that’d be not horribly bad, even against an idiot.)
…and people get a chance to see her in action.
As Trump-basher fearologist? That’s all she’s got. Negative campaigning can work as last resort, but the Sophie’s choice will likely depress turnout (and poll numbers) for both the two most unliked presidential candidates ever.
As she continues to pivot right, (hawkish statements about Iran etc) the revulsion for the lesser of two evils vote will rise.
Two 1% candidates, the system rejecting its new heart (the new voters pulled in by Bernie, the only representative of the 99%.) Anything else to discuss?
The system seems programmed to fail the people, it’s down to how spectacularly at this point.