25 Likes
Most accurate poll is actually not basing its results on polling at all, but moreso “popular enthusiasm” as determined by a company whose Twitter account defends right wing murderers
Need to change thread title to “Nothing more could have been done”
Bernie or bust, IMO.
I’ll leave those decisions to the governors… and sue them if they disagree with dumbasses who love me!
So they’ll shoot me but they’ll allow Biden to win an election.
Allow, broadly defined. Yes.
I think this explanation is pretty good and we have to remember that Trump really didn’t get an impressive number of votes, despite his base’s enthusiasm and any claims to the contrary. The real problem was that people couldn’t see enough of a difference between him and Hillary to be arsed to vote.
I donated on ActBlue the other day for access to the Princess Bride thing, you can very easily not report your employer.
2 Likes
I’ve never been more certain that he will win a 2nd term in November than I am now.
1 Like
It’s built off of Prof. Mark Blyth’s analysis. Blyth is a professor of Political Economy at Brown University. He was raised working class in Scotland, and the author of “Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea” and “Angrynomics”.
I typed out a transcript of the first few minutes of the video, in case anyone would prefer to read what he has to say in order to gauge whether to listen.
Summary
November 2016:
Mark Blyth: I wasn’t surprised at all[about the election result]. Many of you have been sat here in this room with me where I’ve spoken about global Trumpism and various things like that. The first time that I came out publicly and said that I thought that he would win was at a Watson event in May of last year(2015). I did an interview in Greece that went viral when I predicted both Brexit and Trump. It’s not because I have a clairvoyant crystal ball sitting under my bed, or I made a pact with Satan to see the future in a mirror. It’s simply pretty obvious if you think about it in a more global way. This is not a local event. Everything that Prof. Shillet said is true about this election. Brexit happened and there’s a leftwing version of this that brought us Greece. There’s a shrinkage of center party votes across the OECD. There’s a collapse of leftwing party votes in particular across western Europe. Coming up next, Renzi is going to fail in the referendum in Italy which will cause a constitutional crisis. Shortly after that is the French election.
I would like to remind you of the following statistics. The lowest that George W Bush ever got in his approval rating was 29%. The president of France currently has an approval rating of 4%. The National Front have nearly 40% of the intended vote. So, even with the design of the French constitution which makes it very difficult: you have to have a second round, etc. the most popular political party by a factor of two in France is the National Front. After that we have the German elections coming up. Merkel is vulnerable. How is all of this going to play out and where is it all connected?
Here’s a simple way of thinking about it. From 1945 until 1975 we targeted a particular economic variable called full employment, and there’s a thing called the Lucas Critique, that basically says that if you keep targeting something, people will game it. And they did. Unions gamed it, employers gamed it, and the result was inflation. After a while that inflation became painful. Painful enough that the people who were hurt by it, who were the creditor classes in these countries, banded together to fund a market friendly revolution. They liberated finance, deregulated banks, and integrated the economies of the world. They globalized labor in such a way that labor could no longer demand that it gets its share of productivity, because if they do I’ll just move your job somewhere else.
All those trade agreements that were signed, the globalization that was inevitable and we can’t roll back. You know you can go on the web and type in “WTO text” and you’ll find that it’s a very long 700 page legal agreement that took 5 years to thrash out between corporate interests, lawyers, and lobbyists. With very little input from civil society. The same is true of the EU’s agreements on capital movements, the banking union, take your pick. There was a moment when people started to figure out that for the past 30 years going from 1985 until now, huge amounts of money have been generated in the global economy. This we know from the work of Thomas Picketty and others. Most of it has gone up to a tiny fraction of the population. So, there’s been a huge amount of growth, but hardly anyone has benefited.
You don’t have to go far to see this. Get off the East side, go to the west side of Providence. Go to northwest Providence and walk into neighborhoods that have check cashing agencies, fried chicken joints, pawn shops, broken down fix-your-mobile and networks you’ve never heard of stores. That’s the reality for people. Not just here but in many, many countries. So, they’re a bit fed up with this. They’ve decided that at any possible opportunity, whether it’s Brexit, the Italian Constitutional referendum or anything, to basically give their elites notice–that we’ve had enough of this. That’s what this is.
Now there is a macroeconomic underpinning to this one too. Because after we targeted full employment for 30 years, we decided to target inflation for 30 years. I don’t see how the Lucas Critique doesn’t apply to that as well. We’ve managed to create a world in which you can dump 13 trillion euros into the global money supply through quantitative easing and other programs, and there’s no inflation anywhere. Here’s your problem. When you’ve levered up your banking system and bailed it out, dumped it on the public purse, and say [to the public] you need to cut that terrible debt. When people’s personal balance sheets are still bloated from all the credit that they took on in the 2000s, and they don’t have wage growth, and there is no inflation to ease the burden of the debt. Then the creditors fight harder to get their money back. Whether it’s the case of Germany vs the rest of the Eurozone, or the creditor class vs the debtor class, what we have everywhere are creditor/debtor standoffs.
Those standoffs take different forms: for the left it takes the form of Podemos, for the right it takes the form of the National Front. For Trump, which has a weird coalition which is of course sexist, and of course racist, and of course anti-immigrant and all the rest of it. But one part of it is if you look at the states that really fell hard, the Rust Belt, it’s economic. If you recognize that simple fact you can put Trump in there with Brexit, and Jeremy Corbin and all the rest of it. I’ll leave you with one set of numbers that I found today, which I think is just an absolute clanger for this whole thing. In 2015 Wall Street bonuses(not regular compensation) seven years after they were bailed out with the public purse totaled $28.4B. Total compensation paid to every single person in this country who earns minimum wage, $14B. I’ll stop there.
2 Likes
“When George Floyd was saying, ‘I can’t breathe,’ and then he died, and now we’re wearing a mask and we say, ‘I can’t breathe,’ but we’re being forced to wear it anyways.”
… and you haven’t died, lady, so I guess you’re a lying liar!
3 Likes
The biggest heartbreaker was the “more people die from the flu” kid. Poor little guy has no chance.
8 Likes
Just to be clear about what we’re discussing here, the intentional prevention of births among an ethnic group is genocide. If this is true, the Trump Administration has officially already carried out a genocide, on some scale.
6 Likes
That was the only time, and we made it like six storms into the Greek alphabet, which was Zeta.
This is why their long-term strategy is cheating and fascism.
They’ll probably try to hold power anyway if they lose, but this is our best shot at removing them.
I feel this. I said pre-2016 that if Trump was actually elected he was a lock to go down as the worst President in US history. Even I didn’t realize he would be this bad.
4 Likes
Between this and intentionally holding back covid aid once the numbers showed that POC (read Dems) were more likely to be affected there is no doubt this regime has perpetrated genocide on some scale.
Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically.
5 Likes
I just checked CNN for news on the hurricane. Things are so bad news on this event that is imminent and will kill people and cause billions in damage and has already caused catastrophic flooding isn’t anywhere to be found in the top 15 headlines.
That’s how bad things are.
2 Likes
I check foxnews about once a week. They must have decided misogyny was the key to 2016. Every time I check they have Pelosi as the lead story.
2 Likes
Yeah I think the absence of aid case is tougher to make than this one, though, and I think most Americans would have a tough time accepting it. If you accept the absence of aid case, you can make a strong case for Bush on Katrina.