A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Thursday, September 17, 2026 09:05
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Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.: “One hundred percent of my focus is on stopping this new administration.” He’s handed the Biden administration all the excuses they need to sidestep the Republicans in negotiations over future priorities. Why bother wasting time negotiating with Republicans when there’s tape of McConnell saying all of his focus is on blocking everything Biden brings to the table?
McConnell tried to tone down his comment some, telling a reporter, "My view at the moment is we need to turn this administration into a moderate administration." But it's too late. McConnell gave a perfect soundbite that confirmed what everyone had already assumed: Republicans in the Senate under McConnell’s leadership have already decided, much as they did under President Barack Obama, to stonewall anything the president wants to pass.
McConnell: “I think the best way to look at what this new administration is: The president may have won the nomination, but Bernie Sanders won the argument.” It’s been a common refrain from him and other GOP senators that after campaigning as a moderate, President Joe Biden is basically doing the bidding of his party’s left flank.
video at https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/mcconnell-dodged-liz-cheney-drama-helped
-biden-n1266583
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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McConnell is a piece of shit for sure, but he's not wrong on this issue.
Democrats can't sidestep the Republicans. The filibuster won't be broken. The intelligent members of Congress know better than to appease your need for instant gratification when the costs are as high as they are.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:You are not comparing how the Federal government operated during the years when America was doing exceptionally well. When things were going well, things were being done completely opposite to what McConnell and the Republicans want today. On both taxes and level of public investment, Biden is returning to levels reflected in past periods of progress:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
McConnell is a piece of shit for sure, but he's not wrong on this issue.
Democrats can't sidestep the Republicans. The filibuster won't be broken. The intelligent members of Congress know better than to appease your need for instant gratification when the costs are as high as they are.
"Biden has the opportunity to be a restorational president," said Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University (Houston Texas) presidential historian. At 78, he "is trying to restore the America that was his America until the Reagan Revolution became dominant."
Government's role in economic life has grown with the nation throughout American history. Canals, railroads and land-grant colleges in the 19th century gave way to electrification, interstate highways and social insurance in the 20th. A progressive era constitutional amendment paved the way for federal income taxes on individuals as well as corporations.
As Washington financed President Dwight Eisenhower's highway system, John F. Kennedy's moon mission, and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, federal investment in infrastructure, research and development and education peaked at 6.4% of the size of America's economy in the 1960s. It declined thereafter, to 2.6% by 2019.
Had it remained at 6.4% that year, federal investment would have been $800 billion higher every year. That's twice the $400 billion annual cost of Biden's agenda, which is spread over 10 years.
Biden's tax proposals appear modest in the context of recent history. The 1981 tax cut Ronald Reagan signed cut the top personal income rate from 70% to 50%. Biden proposes an uptick from 37% to 39.6% -- where the top rate stood before President Donald Trump's 2017 tax cuts.
The corporate tax rate topped 30% for decades before Trump slashed it to 21%. Once the source of more than one-third of federal revenue, the corporate tax provided just 6.6% by 2019.
More at https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/09/politics/biden-economic-agenda-transfor
mational/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Ridin's with the Bidens?
Biden to Promote $4 Trillion Plans in Visit to Virginia School
https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2021-05-03/biden-to-prom
ote-4-trillion-plans-in-visit-to-virginia-school
‘From the desk of Donald J. Trump’: New strategy after Facebook, Twitter keep up Trump social media bans
https://www.stardem.com/news/national/from-the-desk-of-donald-j-trump-
new-strategy-after-facebook-twitter-keep-up-trump/article_42cfeb7f-133a-530f-8fca-2e909c2e0dba.html
VP Harris says she was last person in the room with President Biden when he made the decision to pull all US troops out of Afghanistan.
https://nypost.com/2021/04/25/harris-was-last-voice-in-the-room-for-af
ghanistan-withdrawal/
Rudy Giuliani claims FBI turned down Hunter Biden’s hard-drives THREE TIMES in raid despite taking all other electronics
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14810656/rudy-giuliani-hunter-biden-hard
-drives-fbi-raid/
Biden bans ICE and Customs and Border Protection from using term 'illegal aliens'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9488395/Biden-bans-ICE-Custom
s-Border-Protection-using-illegal-aliens-migrants.html
Hunter Biden to be guest speaker for Tulane course on 'media polarization'
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/hunter-biden-to-be-guest-speak
er-for-tulane-course-on-media-polarization
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A Supreme Court Ruling Protecting Payday Lenders Could Also Save Facebook and Martin Shkreli
The court planted more roadblocks on the path to proving that deceptive conduct merits a financial penalty.
Last month, the Supreme Court unanimously decided a underexamined case that is going to do significant damage to the Federal Trade Commission, rolling back the commission’s power to compensate victims of fraudsters through court-imposed penalties and siding with a payday loan kingpin in a tussle over the repatriation of about $1.3 billion to borrowers.
The court’s decision effectively put an end to a practice that the FTC— tasked with enforcing a wide array of consumer protection matters— has engaged in for decades and imperils the agency’s ability to act swiftly and nimbly to protect vulnerable Americans’ finances.
The FTC successfully sued Scott Tucker— a Kansas City tycoon who controlled several payday loan companies— alongside his businesses in 2012. The $1.3 billion court-issued penalty against Tucker and his companies was the largest of its kind in the FTC’s enforcement history. Tucker lost his appeal in the Ninth Circuit. He then petitioned the Supreme Court, claiming that the commission lacked the authority to redress businesses’ deceptive practices by going directly to court to seek monetary relief. The Supreme Court agreed.
Though it flew under the radar, the Supreme Court’s ruling should have bred a blizzard of denunciations. The payday loan industry, which funnels short-term, high-cost loans to cash-strapped Americans, is a $30 billion quicksand machine that exists to siphon money from the poor and bury consumers in debt.
The court left a gaping hole in the FTC’s enforcement toolbox, ensuring that many fewer Americans will be compensated by companies who swindle them. The commission brings dozens of cases each year seeking the return of ill-gotten funds; many of those cases are now at risk of collapsing. In testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee, FTC Acting Chairwoman Rebecca Kelly Slaughter emphasized that the FTC was badly bruised by the decision and called on Congress to restore the agency’s powers. Slaughter also noted that the court’s decision could ensnare 24 active FTC court cases amounting to $2 billion in requested penalties. That slate of FTC cases includes a lawsuit against the infamous former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli and his associates who stand accused of improperly inflating medicinal drug prices.
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/05/supreme-court-payday-faceb
ook-martin-shkreli.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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How bad are Payday loans these days?
They've got to be terrible terms even compared to how bad they were in the days of the GWB administration.
Even with a great credit score, my credit card APR's are pathetic. I know I could haggle on that if I wanted to, but I've never bothered since I never carry any debt.
My point though is that even with a score in the mid 820's compared to my score in the 740's 15 years ago, my lowest APR is 5% higher than my highest APR was back then, even though the FED rate is 0.05%. And I never haggled on interest back then either. They just gave me 4.99 to 9.99% back then. I've got two cards now with a 29.99%.
The nerve.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:Other nervy swindlers :
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The nerve.
Multilevel-marketing companies are forcing people into debt and psychological crisis
“I was urged to stop paying my bills to invest in more inventory. I was urged to get rid of television. I was urged to pawn my vehicle. I just had to get on anxiety meds over all of it because I’ve started having panic attacks.”
As economic opportunity has become more concentrated in urban areas in the US, rural communities have fallen behind. Residents of towns like Casper (Wyoming), Spring Creek (Nevada), and DeRidder (Louisiana) all missed out on economic recovery following the 2007 global financial crisis. Bootstrapping, hard-working families in these regions are urgently searching for a way to regain their economic liberty, along with their dignity.
Fed the fantasy of achieving the all-elusive American dream, many of them are being wooed by multilevel-marketing companies. Known as MLMs (or “direct-sales”), the previous US administration was stocked with their cheerleaders: Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, is married to a cofounder of Amway; Ben Carson is a spokesperson for a vitamin MLM called Mannatech; and president Donald Trump used to have an MLM, Trump Network, and was a spokesperson for another.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20170806213250/https://qz.com/1039331/mlms
-like-avon-and-lularoe-are-sending-people-into-debt-and-psychological-crisis/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The Republican Party Leadership Is Terrified of Trump’s Revenge
Why has the Republican Party's leadership caved in to Donald Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him? They've caved in thanks to ordinary extortion. They believe that if they oppose Trump he will destroy the Republican Party in a spasm of sheer bloody-minded vengeance.
Trump, after all, plainly has no special loyalty to the Republican Party. And retribution against his enemies is his single strongest drive in life. If the GOP leadership rejected him, he would reject them in return ten times over, probably by forming his own political party and taking with him half of all Republicans in existence.
https://jabberwocking.com/the-republican-party-is-terrified-of-trumps-
revenge/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Other nervy swindlers :
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The nerve.
Multilevel-marketing companies are forcing people into debt and psychological crisis
“I was urged to stop paying my bills to invest in more inventory. I was urged to get rid of television. I was urged to pawn my vehicle. I just had to get on anxiety meds over all of it because I’ve started having panic attacks.”
As economic opportunity has become more concentrated in urban areas in the US, rural communities have fallen behind. Residents of towns like Casper (Wyoming), Spring Creek (Nevada), and DeRidder (Louisiana) all missed out on economic recovery following the 2007 global financial crisis. Bootstrapping, hard-working families in these regions are urgently searching for a way to regain their economic liberty, along with their dignity.
Fed the fantasy of achieving the all-elusive American dream, many of them are being wooed by multilevel-marketing companies. Known as MLMs (or “direct-sales”), the previous US administration was stocked with their cheerleaders: Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, is married to a cofounder of Amway; Ben Carson is a spokesperson for a vitamin MLM called Mannatech; and president Donald Trump used to have an MLM, Trump Network, and was a spokesperson for another.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20170806213250/https://qz.com/1039331/mlms
-like-avon-and-lularoe-are-sending-people-into-debt-and-psychological-crisis/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump, after all, plainly has no special loyalty to the Republican Party.
Trump was a lifelong Democrat.
Not the type of shitbag Democrats that are in the Democratic Party today.
Quote:
And retribution against his enemies is his single strongest drive in life. If the GOP leadership rejected him, he would reject them in return ten times over, probably by forming his own political party and taking with him half of all Republicans in existence.
He's not taking anything or anyone. Fuck those NeoCon dirtbags. They're the ones who should just leave.
They can join the Democrats and along with Pelosi force out all of the fringe "progressive" Leftists, and form the Fuck the People Party.
Because that's what they are. And I'm getting just a tad tired of them having a majority stake in both political parties.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Is politics the new religion?
For many Americans, politics has become imbued with a religious fervor – while at the same time, participation in organized religion has plummeted.
Mandy will always remember Jan. 6, 2021, in a deeply personal way. Because she was there, inside the U.S. Capitol, supporting her president.
The images she saw that day remain sharp: The giant American flag carried by the crowd as they marched from the Ellipse. Singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the Capitol steps. And finally, entering the building through open doors and standing peacefully in its cavernous Rotunda.
She’s aware of the videos showing mob violence. But that must have been on the other side of the Capitol, she says. For her, it was a day of jubilation, of like-minded people joined in common purpose to “stop the steal” of the 2020 election.
“This was probably the most patriotic day of my life,” says Mandy (not her real name), who asks to remain anonymous so as not to risk her job. With a Facebook page that’s a hub of pro-Trump connections, she says she’s traveled to 21 rallies for now-former President Donald Trump since 2016. “I go for the people as much as I do for Trump.”
Similar stories of secular communion have given rise to a theory that has gotten considerable attention of late: that for many Americans, politics has become a quasi-religion – especially as participation in actual, organized religion has plummeted. Indeed, Mandy says she believes in God, and grew up Southern Baptist, but is not currently a churchgoer.
The United States has long been known for what some sociologists call “civil religion” – a shared, nonsectarian faith centered on the flag, the nation’s founding documents, and God. But the God factor is waning, as so-called nones – atheists, agnostics, and those who self-identify as “nothing in particular” – have risen to more than a third of the U.S. population, according to a major 2020 survey out of Harvard University.
From MAGA devotees on the right to social justice warriors on the “woke left,” political activism that can feel “absolute” in a quasi-religious way is rampant. At the same time, American membership in houses of worship has plummeted to below 50% for the first time in eight decades of Gallup polling – from 70% in 1999 to 47% in 2020.
And as American politics has become polarized, so too has the nation’s religious profile. The mainstream Protestant center has hollowed out, its population shrinking dramatically. Today, religious Americans tend to choose their congregation with an eye toward partisanship – to the point where the choice of presidential candidate can lead a voter to move to a new church.
“Liberals and ‘nones’ went to the left; conservatives and Evangelicals went to the right,” says Ryan Burge, an expert on religion and politics at Eastern Illinois University, and author of a new book called “The Nones.” “There’s no middle anymore.”
Atheists, he says, are now the most politically active group in the U.S. They’re far from the largest, at 6% of the population, but statistically they are the most likely to engage in political activity.
“Our politics has become religion. It has a religious fervor to it now that it didn’t have even 20 or 30 years ago,” says Professor Burge, who is also a Baptist pastor.
Why is this happening? Some point to social media and news consumption habits that have cordoned Americans off into ideological echo chambers that are all-consuming and provoke emotional responses. The sense of connection some find online may be replacing social networks once formed by houses of worship.
Geographic sorting, in which people tend to live near those with similar political views, is another component. Higher education, dominated by professors who lean left, may help explain why so many college-educated young people now reject religion, with some instead finding a sense of purpose and meaning in political activism. A cultural emphasis on science and “rationalism” is also a factor.
Still, there’s a lot of nuance.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Is politics the new religion?
It sure is for cancel culture Leftists. The amount of stuff they censor and people they shut down today would have been a wet dream of the Religious Right in the 80s and 90s.
Fuck your cult.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:There is only one cult and Trump is its Jesus: Lindsey Graham, South Carolina senator, said something recently that told more truth than maybe he intended.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Is politics the new religion?
It sure is for cancel culture Leftists. The amount of stuff they censor and people they shut down today would have been a wet dream of the Religious Right in the 80s and 90s.
Fuck your cult.
Graham said of Trump: "He's the most popular Republican in the country by a lot. If you try to drive him out of the Republican Party, half the people will leave."
Yes they will! And if half (or even a third) of people who identify as Republicans right now left the party if there were a concerted effort on behalf of the establishment -- such as it is -- to rid the party of Trump, then the GOP would have approximately a 0.0% chance of winning a national election.
Which Trump knows. And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell knows. And House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy knows.
(Worth noting: Republicans lost control of the White House, the Senate and the House during Trump's time in office.)
All of which creates a simple dynamic: Trump has the Republican Party right where he wants it -- using his cult following among a large segment of the Republican base to hold the party hostage.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/13/politics/lindsey-graham-republican-part
y-trump-support/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the Biden administration over its decision to rescind a Medicaid waiver extension that would ensure billions in emergency care funding to the state’s hospitals over several years.
Federal health officials revoked the extension in April, saying the Trump administration, which had approved it in its waning days, failed to allow for public comment. They have welcomed the state to reapply before the current waiver lapses in the fall of 2022.
In a suit filed Friday, Paxton argued that the officials lacked authority to overturn the decision, and said the state and its health care providers had already made long-term financial decisions based on the approval.
“Not only does this violate agency regulations and threaten to rip a $30 billion hole in Texas’s budget, it was clearly intended to force our state into inefficiently expanding Medicaid under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” Paxton said in a statement. “This would be a disaster for our state, and yet President Biden seems intent on thrusting his bloated model of government on everyone—including Texas.”
The administration’s reversal was widely seen as an attempt to pressure the state into expanding Medicaid under the ACA, a move most other states have made since the law passed in 2010.
Republican leaders have declined numerous proposals to expand the safety net coverage, including in the current legislative session, explaining they are focused on other health care priorities. Lawmakers in the House voted down an amendment this week to even study the potential benefits of Medicaid expansion.
Proponents of expansion say it will lower hospital and county expenses, boost the state’s economy and create access to preventive care for up to a million low-income Texans. The state has the highest uninsured rate in the country.
In surveys, most Texans support expanding Medicaid.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210514182334/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/politics/texas/article/Texas-AG-Ken-Paxton-sues-Biden-administration-16177408.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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It all began when the intellectual Godfather of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., defined that movement as standing athwart history yelling stop. What Buckley was trying to stop was the New Deal—the expansion of government under Franklin Roosevelt. He was also referring to the growing secularization of society. His first book, "God and Man at Yale," published in 1951, was a diatribe against what he believed were the anti-Christian and anti-capitalist forces at the nation's best universities.
Buckley yelled stop again during the civil-rights movement, writing in 1957 that "the South must prevail" because the more "advanced" white race had an obligation and right to rule over others. He changed his mind during the mid-1960s, but many conservatives remained staunchly opposed to the landmark civil-rights bills of 1964 and 1965.
In other words, the modern Republican Party has its roots in rebellion—rebellion against the main currents of change in modern American society: the growth of the welfare state, the secularization of life and the increasing diversity of American society.
The trouble is, most Americans don't agree with that protest. They may express discomfort with the welfare state in theory, but in practice they love Social Security, Medicare and the rest. Secularization is a force that is sweeping through almost all advanced industrial societies and one government can do little to stop. And America's growing diversity is inevitable in a country built on immigration and has mostly proved to be a strength, not a weakness.
But Republican politicians are now riding the back of a tiger and they can't get off. Former President Ronald Reagan, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former President Donald Trump — all icons on the right — whip up their followers into a froth of hysteria and promise that they will repeal and reverse most of these terrible trends.
But of course it never happens: When Republicans take power, they don't actually repeal government programs that, in reality, are popular. Which makes the Republican base get more and more angry. And as their sense of betrayal grows, so does their desperation that American civilization is in imminent danger of collapse.
There is a great and honorable space in America for a party of limited and efficient government that values traditionalism and believes that social change should take place slowly and organically. But that is different from what has become a band of ideological warriors with apocalyptic vision that fears the ends of days, sees opponents as devils and traitors and believes that all methods are sanctioned in its battle to save civilization and itself.
More at www.cnn.com/2021/05/16/opinions/fareed-gop-special-op-ed/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Noam Chomsky tells you where $47 trillion went
I’m sure you’ve read about Reagan’s inaugural address in 1981. The punchline was, “Government is the problem, not the solution.” Okay, so if government is not the solution, who is the solution? Where will decisions be made if not in government? Does it take a genius to figure this out? They’ll be made in corporate boardrooms. So, in other words, we shift decisions from government — which whatever its flaws, is, at least, partially responsive to the general population — to private tyrannies, which are totally unaccountable to the public, and which are dedicated, explicitly — there’s no secret about it — to maximizing what’s called “shareholder value”: dividends, benefits to management. That’s their task.
We have 40 years of experience, and we can see what’s happened. It was totally predictable. To give you just one example, you may have seen it, but a couple of months ago the RAND Corporation did a detailed study trying to determine how much wealth was transferred from the working class and middle class to the superrich during the 40 neoliberal years. They estimated $47 trillion. www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
Some call it “transfer.” “Robbery” is a better term. Meanwhile, the top 0.1 percent of the population doubled their share of total wealth from 10 percent to 20 percent. Take a look at the effects: the majority of the population gets by paycheck to paycheck. Real wages have stagnated for 40 years. The gains of productivity growth concentrate in very few pockets. This leads to what you mentioned before — unfocused anger. Is it surprising? People aren’t told what is really robbing them. Instead, they are told that it is immigrants, Blacks, some pedophiles from outer space, if you believe QAnon. Anything but what is actually happening.
You can talk about it to high school students. They often understand it better than graduate students at major universities, who have been more indoctrinated. Something that not many people read but should is the introduction to Animal Farm. Animal Farm is seen as safe, because it is a satire of the totalitarian enemy. The introduction, which was not initially published, is addressed to the people of England. Orwell warns not to feel too self-righteous because in free England, ideas can be suppressed.
The Republicans, who are the party of the superrich, understood in the 1970s that you can’t get votes by coming to people and saying, “I want to rob you, and hand everything you have over to the rich and corporate sector.” Somehow that doesn’t work. You have to turn to what are called “cultural issues,” meaning everything but what matters for your life. So, Paul Weyrich, one of the main Republican strategists, by the mid-1970s got a flash of insight and realized that, if the Republicans pretend, stress “pretend,” to be opposed to abortion, they’ll pick up the evangelical vote and the Northern Catholic vote. So, they all switched on a dime. Reagan had been a strong supporter of a woman’s right to choose. As governor of California, he signed one of the strongest bills protecting it. He then became a passionate opponent of abortion. George H. W. Bush, who was supposed to have had some character, did the same. It became the mantra of the Republican Party. If you look into the details, it’s pretty grotesque. In fact, what the party platform is doing is increasing abortion, and they know it. When you undermine family planning, block contraceptives, cut health care, defund Planned Parenthood, then you increase abortions, especially illegal and dangerous ones. It doesn’t matter to them, because this is a way to pick up votes.
It’s an extension of Nixon’s Southern Strategy. That was their first big breakthrough. Nixon was a terrible racist himself, and he realized that by not so subtly advocating racism he could pick up the Southern vote. Reagan, who was a dedicated racist, just did it as second nature.
More at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dismantle-all-of-this-stuff-a-conv
ersation-with-noam-cho
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Republicans, who are the party of the superrich
Maybe in the 70's.
Every time you turn on the TV and see a rich person they're all Democrats today.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:I thought I would check:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The Republicans, who are the party of the superrich
Maybe in the 70's.
Every time you turn on the TV and see a rich person they're all Democrats today.
How are America’s billionaires voting in the 2020 presidential election?
If you think they’re all coming out in support of their fellow Forbes 400 member, Donald Trump, you’d be wrong. Over the past month Forbes sent every billionaire in the U.S. a brief election survey. We got 42 responses, from billionaires spanning the political spectrum.
The biggest takeaway: These billionaires are more likely to be Republican than the average American—but just about as likely to be voting for Joe Biden.
A recent Gallup poll shows that 28% of Americans identify as Republicans, 27% identify as Democrats and 42% identify as independents. Our billionaire cohort skewed farther right: 43% Republicans, 24% Democrats and 33% independents. Yet they’re swaying blue. Nearly half, or 48%, say they’re casting a ballot for Biden, compared to 40% for Trump. That tracks with the larger population, which favors Biden to Trump 51-42, according to RealClearPolitics’ RCP Poll Average. It also tracks with Federal Election Commission data, which shows more billionaires opening their wallets to support Biden than Trump.
Of course, not all are supporting the major parties. One billionaire, who remained anonymous, is voting for Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen. Another, self-driving car sensor magnate David Hall, is voting for the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins, despite identifying as a Republican.
More at www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2020/10/20/even-americas-billionaire
s-are-tilting-toward-biden-in-the-2020-presidential-race/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Kurt Vonnegut’s Socialism From Outer Space
By Matthew Gannon and Wilson Taylor
Writer Kurt Vonnegut, who died on April 11, 2007, used science fiction to explore the failings that turned humans against each another – and came to view socialism as the alternative to a world of exploitation.
Vonnegut’s work is rich with fantastical ideas, often mediated through the conventions of science fiction, that are motivated by real injustices and tragedies – ideas that speak to the moral imagination and political conviction that Vonnegut expressed throughout his life. A pacifist, socialist, and humanist, Vonnegut weaves a bright thread of anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-racism throughout his literature. That’s why Vonnegut’s writing can be summed up neatly as a ‘Gospel from Outer Space’, sharing the title of a fictional story that Vonnegut attributes to his alter ego Kilgore Trout in Slaughterhouse-Five.
Trout envisions the Tralfamadorians retelling the New Testament to underscore that ‘the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.’ The problem with the Gospels as they are, the aliens reason, is that the message actually communicated is this: ‘Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected.’ The rewritten New Testament, then, makes it so that Jesus really was a nobody who gets adopted by God after his crucifixion. The new message is that God ‘will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!’ It was Easter three days before Vonnegut died – another of the time-coincidences he would have loved.
Another time-coincidence concerning Vonnegut is that he died on the eleventh of the month. Vonnegut was preoccupied by the eleventh. He was born on 11 November 1922, and his birthday happened to be a holiday marking the end of World War I in 1918: the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. But Vonnegut disdained the American term Veterans Day, despite being a veteran himself, preferring instead to call it by its original name, Armistice Day.
‘Armistice Day was sacred,’ he writes in his 1975 novel Breakfast of Champions. ‘Veterans’ Day is not.’ Writing at the end of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut was clearly captivated by the idea that ‘during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.’ He referred to such a ‘sudden silence’ as the ‘Voice of God’.
Turning the commemoration of an armistice into the glorification of violence went against what Vonnegut stood for – not that he thought protesting against war in a work of literature would do very much. ‘During the Vietnam War,’ he once remarked, ‘every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.’
In a sense, the custard pie is what Vonnegut served. He described his work as wrapping ‘bitter coatings around very sweet pills,’ and his novels, for all their barbed cynicism and biting humor, seek to invigorate our atrophied sense of human sympathy and solidarity – to enliven a new aesthetic and ethical framework that can awaken us from the nightmare of history and animate a new spirit of human freedom and dignity.‘My motives are political,’ Vonnegut noted, characterising himself as an ‘agent of change’, an ‘evolutionary cell’ who sought to make humanity ‘aware of itself, in all its complexity, and to dream its dreams.’
And what dreams may come: the ‘telegraphic schizophrenic’ structure of his novels—texts that are ‘so short and jumbled and jangled,’ as he assessed Slaughterhouse-Five—both awakens readers to the absurdities of our misbegotten late-capitalist contemporary and invites us to dream the world anew.
More at https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/04/kurt-vonneguts-socialism-from-outer-s
pace 
Th
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lol
No. Vonnegut was not a Socialist.
None of your Socialist jerkoff buddies are going to change that.
Peddle your trash somewhere else.
--------------------------------------------------
Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:What are you talking about? Have you ever read his novels? You can't possibly miss the message in the novels! Oops, I forgot that you are Trumptard. Trumptards always miss the message. Try one of his speeches, where Vonnegut makes the point about socialism very clear: Kurt Vonnegut: 'I would like to see America try socialism', Bennington College -1970
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
lol
No. Vonnegut was not a Socialist.
None of your Socialist jerkoff buddies are going to change that.
Peddle your trash somewhere else.
https://speakola.com/grad/kurt-vonnegut-bennington-college-1970
Quote:If Burlington College is not familiar to you, it is where Jane Sanders, Bernie Sanders' wife, was President.
One trouble, it seems to me, is that the majority of the people who rule us, who have our money and power, are lawyers or military men. The lawyers want to talk our problems out of existence. The military men want us to find the bad guys and put bullets through their brains. These are not always the best [two] solutions—particularly in the fields of sewage disposal and birth control.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Portrait of the United States as a Developing Country
Dispelling myths of entrepreneurial exceptionalism, a sweeping new history of U.S. capitalism finds that economic gains have always been driven by the state.
The U.S. war of independence would elevate a fundamental division over the direction of the struggling republic’s political economy. “In this era,” Levy writes, “politicians—not men of business enterprise—were most responsible for charting the republic’s long-term economic future.” Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton personified the clash of competing republicanisms: Jefferson envisioned a self-sufficient agrarian republic predicated on westward expansion, while Hamilton sought to build upon the model of transatlantic finance that had stimulated Northern commerce and manufacturing. The essence of Hamilton’s outlook, Levy writes, was that “in a republic, only state power could harmonize the tension between private self-interest and the public good.” Jefferson virulently opposed this developmental project, fearing that it would marginalize small property owners, fuel oligarchy, and invite a transnational elite to drain the young republic of its economic sovereignty. As it happened, the statecraft of each rival would inform the other. The state’s Hamiltonian financial architecture, including the Bank of the United States, would fund Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, while Jefferson’s embargo on exports during his administration fostered development of the internal market—advancing the incipient industrialization Hamilton had championed in his 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures.
Despite the occasional synthesis of these two developmental visions, it was Jefferson’s that triumphed politically until the Civil War, Levy shows.
More at https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality-politics/justin-h-vassallo-p
ortrait-united-states-developing-country
Download the free book Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States, by economic historian Jonathan Levy from the mirrors at
https://libgen.unblockit.onl/search.php?req=Ages+of+American+Capitalis
m If the URL times out, click it again.
Quote:
In Chapter 19, “Magic of the Market,” the new age opens with a familiar sight: the state reasserting the scarcity value of money and credit. During the years 1979–82, to attack inflation, without being able to resort to any metal standard, given the 1973 monetary departure from gold, the Federal Reserve under the new chairmanship of Paul Volcker rolled out the weapon of the high interest rate. Double-digit interest rates and the sharp double-dip recession that followed the tightening of credit during the “Volcker Shock” finally mastered inflation. The Fed thus ascended to a preeminence in global economic policy making that lasts to this day. In 1982 with the job done and the macroeconomy still in recession, the Fed relented and lowered rates. Newfound price stability brought a surge in confidence and expectations. A new macroeconomic expansion began, led by a speculative investment boom.
What happened after 1982 was not something policy makers expected. Not Volcker, and not President Ronald Reagan. After his inauguration in 1980, Reagan left Volcker alone. His administration, ideologues chiefly, celebrated “the magic of the marketplace,” lambasted “big government” regulations, and decried black “welfare dependency.” In general, their policies were friendly to the owners of wealth. Important “deregulations” did occur. But not one of Reagan’s economic promises—a manufacturing employment revival, a surge in national savings and investment, a reduced budget deficit, a great slash in welfare spending—was fulfilled. Instead, the new capitalism was born.
The Volcker Shock transformed the character of capital investment at home and abroad. In the world economy, high U.S. interest rates brought about a worldwide credit crunch and worldwide economic depression. Seeking high interest rates, global capital moved into the U.S. capital market in prodigious amounts. The value of the dollar soared. Acc
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:What are you talking about? Have you ever read his novels? You can't possibly miss the message in the novels! Oops, I forgot that you are Trumptard. Trumptards always miss the message. Try one of his speeches, where Vonnegut makes the point about socialism very clear: Kurt Vonnegut: 'I would like to see America try socialism', Bennington College -1970
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
lol
No. Vonnegut was not a Socialist.
None of your Socialist jerkoff buddies are going to change that.
Peddle your trash somewhere else.
https://speakola.com/grad/kurt-vonnegut-bennington-college-1970Quote:If Burlington College is not familiar to you, it is where Jane Sanders, Bernie Sanders' wife, was President.
One trouble, it seems to me, is that the majority of the people who rule us, who have our money and power, are lawyers or military men. The lawyers want to talk our problems out of existence. The military men want us to find the bad guys and put bullets through their brains. These are not always the best [two] solutions—particularly in the fields of sewage disposal and birth control.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Don't pretend you've ever read any of Vonnegut's books or stories.
You don't even read news articles past the headlines.
I'm sure you've seen the cover of a Vonnegut book at some point in your life.
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So I guess Second's a socialist now.
lol
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Trump’s War With His Generals
Former President Donald Trump’s last-minute bid to pull U.S. forces from Afghanistan and swaths of the Middle East, Africa and even Europe ahead of Joe Biden's inauguration — and why he blinked.
He was frantically trying to salvage his own legacy while simultaneously trying to overturn the election results and block Biden's transition to power. The result was chaos.
More at www.axios.com/off-the-rails-trump-military-withdraw-afghanistan-571701
2a-d55d-4819-a79f-805d5eb3c6e2.html
Quote:
this was typical of Pentagon leadership: Delay key decisions by disputing that strategic meetings had led to consensus, insist the process was still ongoing, and leak apocalyptic scenarios to the media. These were the tactics Trump allies believed military leaders had perfected to obstruct presidents over the course of decades.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Devastating footage of Palisades Fire in California
https://rumble.com/vhdnel-palisades-fire.html
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Time to re-draw the Maps of America
Five Counties Just Voted To Secede From Blue State – They Want To Move The Border Of Oregon And Become Part Of Idaho
https://proudamerican.site/five-counties-just-voted-to-secede-from-blu
e-state-they-want-to-move-the-border-of-oregon-and-become-part-of-idaho/
or a 51st State?
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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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FYI: Roe vs. Wade isn't going anywhere.
Just media scare tactics to get people behind our worst president in a lifetime packing the Supreme Court. Because that's what losers do.
Cheat.
--------------------------------------------------
Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:Senators, not media, are saying that if the Republicans on the Supreme Court strike down Roe v. Wade, the Senators will strike back at the Republicans on the Supreme Court:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
FYI: Roe vs. Wade isn't going anywhere.
Just media scare tactics to get people behind our worst president in a lifetime packing the Supreme Court. Because that's what losers do.
Cheat.
Quote:https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/554843-democrats-roe-v-wade-blow-w
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee . . . said it doesn’t mean that a Congress led by Democrats would immediately be able to add justices to the court, but he suggested it would add momentum to reform efforts at a minimum.
“Chipping away at Roe v. Wade will precipitate a seismic movement to reform the Supreme Court,” he said. “It may not be expanding the Supreme Court, it may be making changes to its jurisdiction, or requiring a certain numbers of votes to strike down certain past precedents.”
No one knows for sure when the Supreme Court will hand down its decision on the Mississippi abortion law, but it is widely expected to hear arguments after it convenes in October. That could set up a decision next year.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), another member of the Judiciary Committee, said the court’s review of the Mississippi law raises serious concerns.
“It really enlivens the concerns that we have about the extent to which right-wing billionaire money has influenced the makeup of the court and may even be pulling strings at the court,” he said.
“We’ve got a whole array of options we’re looking at in the courts committee,” he said of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, which President Biden established by executive order in April.
Whitehouse said even if there isn’t enough support for expanding the Supreme Court by four seats, which is a proposal that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced last month, other reforms could be pursued.
He cited “easy” reforms such as “proper disclosure and transparency” of the “gifts, travel and hospitality” received by the judges themselves and the “people who are behind front-group amicus curiae briefs” and who were "funding the political advertisements for the last three judges, writing $15 million and $17 million checks.”
ould-fuel-expanding-supreme-court
6ix, did you catch the hint from Senator Whitehouse that he disapproves of billionaires purchasing the loyalty of Supreme Court justices with “gifts, travel and hospitality”?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
6ix, did you catch the hint from Senator Whitehouse that he disapproves of billionaires purchasing the loyalty of Supreme Court justices with “gifts, travel and hospitality”?
Meaningless pablum.
Where Senator Whitehouse fails is exactly where you fail.
If you're going to go out of your way like the both of you have to brand yourself with a political identity, then you'd better goddamned well be the first to call out bad behavior on your own side.
But neither of you never do this, so everything you say is hypocritical.
I will once again say, as I've said many times in the past, that as much as I can't stand Ted, he's the only one on your "side" in the last 5 years who EVER does this.
He doesn't do it nearly enough, but at least a small part of him deep down realizes that everything isn't black and white and that he doesn't stand on the side of everything right and virtuous in the world while everybody on the other side is evil incarnate.
Nuance is a thing, there are a billion shades of grey in between, and there are many, many bad actors on both sides.
So Ted has at least a sliver of credibility.
You, Second, have none.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:If you paid attention to what the Senator said, you would note that he did NOT imply that Democrats could take bribes while Republican judges would be prosecuted for taking gifts without reporting them. It is more than a little strange how your mind works with the concept of hypocrisy, 6ix. I bet your strangeness gets you into trouble with people who can see that you are mentally malfunctioning. Every Trumptard I know has unemployment, work, money, family, addiction, health (physical and mental) problems that saner and smarter people can easily avoid because they are not screwed up in the head like Trumptards are. Trumptards are a funny bunch.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
6ix, did you catch the hint from Senator Whitehouse that he disapproves of billionaires purchasing the loyalty of Supreme Court justices with “gifts, travel and hospitality”?
Meaningless pablum.
Where Senator Whitehouse fails is exactly where you fail.
If you're going to go out of your way like the both of you have to brand yourself with a political identity, then you'd better goddamned well be the first to call out bad behavior on your own side.
But neither of you never do this, so everything you say is hypocritical.
Ben Shapiro on "hypocrisy," a concept which always trips up Trumptards. Ben is an American conservative political commentator and media host:
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Gross dude.
Get some new talking points. Broken record and despicable with every post you make.
--------------------------------------------------
Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:It was your suggestion but I think the correct move is to shoot you in your house, Trumptard.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Gross dude.
Get some new talking points. Broken record and despicable with every post you make.
--------------------------------------------------
Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
The Banality of Democratic Collapse By Paul Krugman
America’s democratic experiment may well be nearing its end. That’s not hyperbole; it’s obvious to anyone following the political scene. Republicans might take power legitimately; they might win through pervasive voter suppression; G.O.P. legislators might simply refuse to certify Democratic electoral votes and declare Donald Trump or his political heir the winner. However it plays out, the G.O.P. will try to ensure a permanent lock on power and do all it can to suppress dissent.
But how did we get here? We read every day about the rage of the Republican base, which overwhelmingly believes, based on nothing, that the 2020 election was stolen, and extremists in Congress, who insist that being required to wear a face mask is the equivalent of the Holocaust.
I’d argue, however, that focusing on the insanity can hinder our understanding of how all of this became possible. Conspiracy theorizing is hardly a new thing in our national life; Richard Hofstadter wrote “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” back in 1964. White rage has been a powerful force at least since the civil rights movement.
What’s different this time is the acquiescence of Republican elites. The Big Lie about the election didn’t well up from the grass roots — it was promoted from above, initially by Trump himself, but what’s crucial is that almost no prominent Republican politicians have been willing to contradict his claims and many have rushed to back them up.
Or to put it another way, the fundamental problem lies less with the crazies than with the careerists; not with the madness of Marjorie Taylor Greene, but with the spinelessness of Kevin McCarthy.
And this spinelessness has deep institutional roots.
Political scientists have long noted that our two major political parties are very different in their underlying structures. The Democrats are a coalition of interest groups — labor unions, environmentalists, L.G.B.T.Q. activists and more. The Republican Party is the vehicle of a cohesive, monolithic movement. This is often described as an ideological movement, although given the twists and turns of recent years — the sudden embrace of protectionism, the attacks on “woke” corporations — the ideology of movement conservatism seems less obvious than its will to power.
In any case, for a long time conservative cohesiveness made life relatively easy for Republican politicians and officials. Professional Democrats had to negotiate their way among sometimes competing demands from various constituencies. All Republicans had to do was follow the party line. Loyalty would be rewarded with safe seats, and should a Republican in good standing somehow happen to lose an election, support from billionaires meant that there was a safety net — “wing nut welfare” — in the form of chairs at lavishly funded right-wing think tanks, gigs at Fox News and so on.
Of course, the easy life of a professional Republican wasn’t appealing to everyone. The G.O.P. has long been an uncomfortable place for people with genuine policy expertise and real external reputations, who might find themselves expected to endorse claims they knew to be false.
The field I know best, economics, contains (or used to contain) quite a few Republicans with solid academic reputations. Like just about every academic discipline, the field leans Democratic, but much less so than other social sciences and even the hard sciences. But the G.O.P. has consistently preferred to get its advice from politically reliable cranks.
The contrast with the Biden team, by the way, is extraordinary. At this point it’s almost hard to find a genu
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:It was your suggestion but I think the correct move is to shoot you in your house, Trumptard.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Gross dude.
Get some new talking points. Broken record and despicable with every post you make.
--------------------------------------------------
Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
--------------------------------------------------
Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Austerity’s Hidden Purpose
Back in the 1830s, Thomas Peel decided to migrate from England to Swan River in Western Australia. A man of means, Peel took along, besides his family, “300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children,” as well as “means of subsistence and production to the amount of £50,000.” But soon after arrival, Peel’s plans were in ruins.
The cause was not disease, disaster, or bad soil. Peel’s labor force abandoned him, got themselves plots of land in the surrounding wilderness, and went into “business” for themselves. Although Peel had brought labor, money, and physical capital with him, the workers’ access to alternatives meant that he could not bring capitalism.
Karl Marx recounted Peel’s story in Capital, Volume I to make the point that “capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons.” The parable remains useful today in illuminating the difference between money and capital.
Suppose for a moment, and for argument’s sake, that everyone agreed that printing another trillion dollars to finance a basic income for the poor would boost neither inflation nor interest rates. The rich and powerful would still oppose it, owing to the debilitating fear that they would end up like Peel in Australia: monied but bereft of the power to compel the less monied.
We are already seeing evidence of this. In the United States, employers are reporting that they cannot find workers as pandemic lockdown rules are lifted. What they really mean is that they cannot find workers who will work for the pittance on offer. The Biden administration’s extension of a $300 weekly supplementary payment to the unemployed has meant that the combined benefits workers receive are more than twice the federal minimum wage – which Congress refused to lift. In short, employers are experiencing something akin to what happened to Peel soon after he arrived in Swan River.
More about Austerity’s Hidden Purpose at
www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/austerity-goal-to-compel-workers-
low-wages-by-yanis-varoufakis-2021-05
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Yup. And we're already feeling inflation too. You can't just decide that printing trillions of dollars doesn't do this, you clown.
Doubling the prices you pay workers is also going to do the same thing.
I'm fully on board with paying livable wages. $7.25 isn't even worth working for in 2021. If you're living in a state like Illinois, you could work part time for $7.25 an hour all year long and just barely cover your property taxes with that. (I think their minimum is $8.25, but that hardly makes a difference).
Assuming you can swallow your pride and take all the rejection, you could make A LOT more money begging people for money all day long.
There's too many shit jobs out there. Not enough good jobs certainly, but not enough jobs in general too.
The problem is that not even $15/hr is going to be a livable wage the way things are going.
--------------------------------------------------
Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:Half of Americans are doing fine because the economy was designed to benefit them. The higher up you go in wealth, the better the design gets for the wealthy.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The problem is that not even $15/hr is going to be a livable wage the way things are going.
The bottom half of the economy is full of people who sharply sense that they are being screwed but they can't seem to think about the details rationally. They do count their pennies but they also throw away thousands of dollars out of ignorance. If a guy like me starts explaining to them what is happening, they get mad, but not at the system. They are mad at me for telling them the only system they have ever known was carefully designed in all the smallest to largest details in order to cheat them out of their money.
It is actually ridiculous that most Americans, rich or poor, do not understand the system that they live in. If they understood, they be on the way to wealth. But they don't really understand anything at all and they refuse to learn because they think they know it all. It is sad that they cannot even bother to understand that there are better functioning systems, but there are. Within 60 to 120 seconds, rich or poor Americans get too bored to care:
https://confrontingpoverty.org/poverty-facts-and-myths/americas-poor-a
re-worse-off-than-elsewhere/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The laws that Democrats can pass are contingent on getting the most moderate member of the caucus on board. If Joe Manchin (D-WV) says, “I won’t do $15 minimum wage, I’ll do $12.” Then you’re stuck with $12 or you get nothing. And so that’s a reality.
But I think the problem with this analysis is the assumption that Manchin is an ideological roadblock for progressivism, where he seems to me more of a procedural roadblock to the constitutional hardball that needs to get played here. I mean, he voted for the Covid-19 relief bill, and that was one of the most left-wing things I’ve ever seen come out of Congress. So I don’t actually think that Manchin is that far from the center of the caucus in terms of policy.
Where Manchin seems to be very far away from what House Democrats want to do is on the democracy reform stuff. It’s maddening because nothing that Manchin wants to do policy-wise can get done without abolishing the filibuster. Democrats are not going to have a majority after next year if they don’t do some of these things now. So it’s a mistake to assume Manchin can’t be moved. That’s the job of leadership. That’s Joe Biden’s job. That’s Chuck Schumer’s job.
Let’s just say that Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, for whatever reason, refuse to respond to the realities of the moment — then what? It’s bleak. There’s not much else the Democrats can do the next two years as far as legislation. I don’t know what else to say other than the Democrats have to get extremely lucky in next year’s elections. They need to luck into the most favorable environment for the president’s party that we haven’t ever had for a midterm election.
More at https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22432229/democracy-america-dem
ocratic-party-reform
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Half of Americans are doing fine because the economy was designed to benefit them. The higher up you go in wealth, the better the design gets for the wealthy.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
The problem is that not even $15/hr is going to be a livable wage the way things are going.
The bottom half of the economy is full of people who sharply sense that they are being screwed but they can't seem to think about the details rationally. They do count their pennies but they also throw away thousands of dollars out of ignorance. If a guy like me starts explaining to them what is happening, they get mad, but not at the system. They are mad at me for telling them the only system they have ever known was carefully designed in all the smallest to largest details in order to cheat them out of their money.
It is actually ridiculous that most Americans, rich or poor, do not understand the system that they live in. If they understood, they be on the way to wealth. But they don't really understand anything at all and they refuse to learn because they think they know it all. It is sad that they cannot even bother to understand that there are better functioning systems, but there are. Within 60 to 120 seconds, rich or poor Americans get too bored to care:
https://confrontingpoverty.org/poverty-facts-and-myths/americas-poor-a
re-worse-off-than-elsewhere/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
You're a liar. You need to stop interjecting yourself into any of your arguments.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Biden administration to resume border wall construction as crisis worsens
https://www.foxnews.com/us/biden-administration-to-resume-border-wall-
construction-as-crisis-worsens
‘My body, my choice!’: Hundreds of NJ students rally against Rutgers’ COVID vaccine mandate
https://www.thecollegefix.com/my-body-my-choice-hundreds-of-nj-student
s-rally-against-rutgers-covid-vaccine-mandate/
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Good for them.
It very much IS their choice.
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Quote:6ix, tell the world The Truth . . . that this didn't happen, either . . . at least as far as you know . . . and you know it all, as do all Trumptards:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You're a liar. You need to stop interjecting yourself into any of your arguments.
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, even a century later, no one talks about what happened in the city one spring day 100 years ago.
Late in the afternoon of May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black shoe-shiner working in segregated Oklahoma, needed to use the bathroom. The only public restroom he was allowed to use was the one for colored people at the top of the Drexel building in downtown Tulsa; to get there, he had to take an elevator operated by Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white teenager.
While there are conflicting reports about what happened in the elevator, what we do know is that a clothing store clerk on the building’s first floor heard what he thought was a woman screaming. Not long after, the building’s elevator doors opened, and Rowland quickly exited, looking flustered. Page, behind him, appeared to be in a state of distress. Assuming that Page had been sexually assaulted by Rowland, the clerk called the police, thus setting in motion a chain of events that would devastate the Black citizens of Tulsa. Over the next 14 hours, 35 city blocks in Tulsa’s Black neighborhoods were burned, an estimated 800 people were injured, and hundreds were killed in a riotous response to the accusations against Rowland.
I’m a Black man from Oklahoma, so that history is my family history. A cousin was murdered during those hours, and to keep his memory alive, my family on my father’s side tells the story of what happened in Tulsa that day—including that they were never able to find our cousin’s body. I know the story of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre because it is my story, as that cousin’s ancestor. But today, as a professor at Oklahoma State University, I’m always shocked by how few students from this state know that these events even happened at all.
One would think that a film about the massacre, a monumental, devastating moment in this country’s history, would have been made in these intervening years. American filmmakers have never shied away from making movies about this country’s difficult history: (except none of the movies are even remotely as vicious as the more than 30 race-related massacres that occurred in this country between 1917-1921.) That viciousness still exists and has deep repercussions today.
More at https://slate.com/culture/2021/05/tulsa-race-massacre-history-annivers
ary-watchmen-lovecraft-country.html
History shows the Tulsa massacre wasn't an isolated event. These are some of the others: www.cnn.com/interactive/2021/05/us/whitewashing-of-america-racism/?utm
_source=feedburner
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Not related in the slightest to anything we're talking about.
Just how broken is your brain?
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:One obvious point, we are NOT talking because we are not in the same room, where I can get your full attention by picking you up and shaking you awake. But I am actually circling around something I've seen in all Trumptards: a superiority complex that is not backed up by superior performance in the world. I know, 6ix, that you've redefined the word "Trumptard" to mean the opposite, up is down, so that "Trumptard" does NOT include people like you who twice voted for Trump, but that is exactly the nonsensical redefinition I see Trumptards doing every day. It is all part of the "Trumptard" superiority complex which has gotten you, and your ilk, into so much trouble over your lives.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Not related in the slightest to anything we're talking about.
Just how broken is your brain?
Superiority complex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_complex
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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My life is fine, Trumptard.
You couldn't pick me up, old man, but I'd love to see you try and find out where it gets you.
--------------------------------------------------
Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:There you go again, little man, with your superiority complex. And, by the way, your entire history at fireflyfans.net, which you brag about not erasing, shows that your life is the opposite of fine. But, again like all "Trumptards" I know, your way is to say up is down. It may trick you, but that doesn't change reality, 6ix.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
My life is fine, Trumptard.
You couldn't pick me up, old man, but I'd love to see you try and find out where it gets you.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:There you go again, little man, with your superiority complex. And, by the way, your entire history at fireflyfans.net, which you brag about not erasing, shows that your life is the opposite of fine. But, again like all "Trumptards" I know, your way is to say up is down. It may trick you, but that doesn't change reality, 6ix.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
My life is fine, Trumptard.
You couldn't pick me up, old man, but I'd love to see you try and find out where it gets you.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
It's all about trajectory.
You can't appreciate the good times if you haven't experienced any bad ones.
The added bonus here for me is that nobody is going to question what I've been through and what I've overcome. Why would anybody lie about my story I've documented here since I've been a member in 2006?
My biggest enemy has ALWAYS been me. In nearly 100% of people out there, if they're being honest with themselves, that is the case.
But you go right on ahead pretending that Trump and Republicans are your biggest enemy while remaining completely static and never taking any time to improve yourself or your situation.
You're not rich. You don't own a company. You have nothing. You are nothing.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:What a load of self-improvement bullshit. Have you reread your own signature, recently? ". . . just come shoot me in my house." This is not the signature of a sane person, 6ix. As for talking to me, you insanely called me a liar: "You're not rich. You don't own a company. You have nothing. You are nothing." 6ix, you are just making up false stories about me to feel better about yourself, which is more self-improvement bullshit by you. Come to think of it, Trump tells tens of thousands of false stories about himself and his enemies, probably to feel better about himself.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
It's all about trajectory.
You can't appreciate the good times if you haven't experienced any bad ones.
The added bonus here for me is that nobody is going to question what I've been through and what I've overcome. Why would anybody lie about my story I've documented here since I've been a member in 2006?
My biggest enemy has ALWAYS been me. In nearly 100% of people out there, if they're being honest with themselves, that is the case.
But you go right on ahead pretending that Trump and Republicans are your biggest enemy while remaining completely static and never taking any time to improve yourself or your situation.
You're not rich. You don't own a company. You have nothing. You are nothing.
--------------------------------------------------
Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
Mary L Trump wrote the book How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man.
Donald J Trump will never be fine.
It's a free download from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.onl/search.php?req=Mary+L+Trump
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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You are a liar. And a very poor one at that.
Anybody can pretend that they're rich.
Just don't go telling people to kill themselves and Haken won't have to ban you like he did your Communist sock puppet.
--------------------------------------------------
Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:6ix, pretend you're not a Republican:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You are a liar. And a very poor one at that.
Anybody can pretend that they're rich.
Just don't go telling people to kill themselves and Haken won't have to ban you like he did your Communist sock puppet.
The Rotting of the Republican Mind - When one party becomes detached from reality.
www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/opinion/republican-disinformation.html
In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
. . . Much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality. . . . Millions have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending. Who use words like “epistemic”. . . . (epistemicmeans relating to knowledge or to the degree of its validation.)
People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community. . . .
For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.
Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set. . . . The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source.
What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.
Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:6ix, pretend you're not a Republican and pretend you haven't lost your mind:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You are a liar. And a very poor one at that.
Anybody can pretend that they're rich.
Just don't go telling people to kill themselves and Haken won't have to ban you like he did your Communist sock puppet.
--------------------------------------------------
Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
The Rotting of the Republican Mind - When one party becomes detached from reality.
6ix's signature: I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/opinion/republican-disinformation.html
In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
. . . Much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality. . . . Millions have come to detest those who populate the epistemic regime, who are so distant, who appear to have it so easy, who have such different values, who can be so condescending. Who use words like “epistemic”. . . . (epistemic means relating to knowledge or to the degree of its validation.)
People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers. The evangelists of distrust, from Donald Trump to Alex Jones to the followers of QAnon, rose up to give them those stories and provide that community. . . .
For those awash in anxiety and alienation, who feel that everything is spinning out of control, conspiracy theories are extremely effective emotional tools. For those in low status groups, they provide a sense of superiority: I possess important information most people do not have. For those who feel powerless, they provide agency: I have the power to reject “experts” and expose hidden cabals. As Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School points out, they provide liberation: If I imagine my foes are completely malevolent, then I can use any tactic I want.
Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set. . . . The internet is an ideal medium for untested information to get around traditional gatekeepers, but it is an accelerant of the paranoia, not its source. Distrust and precarity, caused by economic, cultural and spiritual threat, are the source.
What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.
Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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I'm not a Republican, and I haven't lost my mind.
The rest of your post was TL;DR. Plus it came from NYT. Nobody cares.
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Why are Senate Republicans just fine with Joe Manchin calling them every name in the book?
In the immediate aftermath of the Senate voting down a bipartisan commission to conduct a soup-to-nuts review of the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, the West Virginia Democrat let loose on his Republican colleagues.
"Choosing to put politics and political elections above the health of our Democracy is unconscionable. And the betrayal of the oath we each take is something they will have to live with."
Oh man! He sure is mad! He called them "unconscionable!!!"
Cut to Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, smiling broadly. Why? Because McConnell, who was the driving force in killing the January 6 commission, couldn't care less about Manchin condemning him. All -- and I mean ALL -- McConnell cares about is whether Manchin has changed or will change his opposition to getting rid of the legislative filibuster. As long as Manchin stays opposed to getting rid of the legislative filibuster, he is McConnell's best buddy -- no matter what the West Virginia Democrat says about his Kentucky Republican colleague.
Unless Manchin changes his mind, the January 6 commission could be only the first in a series of proposals that die in the Senate at the hand of the still-extant filibuster. The next fight is likely to be over Democrats' massive election reform law. President Joe Biden's infrastructure package could also be a filibuster fail.
Manchin will continue to blast Republicans in the Senate for their recalcitrance on issues of critical import to the country while being unwilling to bend on the elimination of the legislative filibuster. Cut to McConnell, smiling broadly.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:Are you an Independent? An "Independent" who votes almost exclusively for Republicans is not independent.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm not a Republican, and I haven't lost my mind.
Technical Note: Voting for 3rd party candidates doesn't make you "Independent" because voting for candidates who can't win is effectively the same as you can't vote.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Daniel Ellsberg Explains Why Now Was The Right Time To Release Top-Secret File On Nuclear Weapons
June 1 2021, 3:21 p.m.
“The whole idea is to kill the bastards,” Gen. Thomas Power, commander of America’s nuclear forces from 1957 to 1963, once said about the use of atomic weapons. “At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win.”
The hold this nuclear lunacy had on the top of the U.S. government is terrifyingly illuminated in a top-secret study of U.S. war plans newly publicized by famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. The document, produced by the RAND Corporation and copied by Ellsberg at the same time he exfiltrated the Pentagon Papers from RAND, examines the U.S. response to the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis. The study’s contents were first reported on May 22 by the New York Times.
The crisis, now completely forgotten, began when China attempted to seize several small islands off its coast from Taiwan. The study shows American generals enthusiastically planning for the use of nuclear weapons against China. It is not simply that the officials looked with equanimity on the possibility of killing millions; rather, many seemed frustrated that there were any delays forced upon them by the rest of the government. If China had not changed course, civilization could have ended then and there.
Ellsberg is now speaking out about the study, he said in a phone interview, for a straightforward reason: “I got scared.” The issues that led to the 1958 crisis between the U.S. and China have never been resolved; both countries are now ramping up confrontational rhetoric; and most importantly, the strategic rationale that led the U.S. to consider nuclear war then remains exactly the same today. Speaking about today’s generals, Ellsberg said, “You shouldn’t be confident that the current calculations are any less crazy.”
More at https://theintercept.com/2021/06/01/daniel-ellsberg-china-atomic-nucle
ar-weapons/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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How Authoritarianism Spread And The U.S. Faltered As A Model For Democracy
I was anchored in a belief that all of these movements somehow needed to coalesce... As I walked the class through a syllabus based upon country after country that had drifted to the nationalist, authoritarian right - Hungary, Turkey, Russia, China, India, Brazil - it was glaringly obvious how interconnected these right-wing nationalists were.
They used common tactics, common narratives, and common conspiracy theories to legitimize their rule; many of them shared common sources of financing, corruption, and political consultants.
Isolated, the resistance movements that gave me hope would likely fail. But if they were connected, perhaps some of them could succeed. That would require an America that came to its senses while recognizing how much had gone wrong.
America had helped shape the world we lived in before descending into the cesspool of the Trump years. We now had a government that was busy radicalizing a huge swath of American society, with pockets of the country turning to violent white supremacy or a QAnon conspiracy theory positing that America is secretly run by a cabal of child sex traffickers.
At precisely the time that progressive forces around the world were under siege, America absented itself from the defense of the most basic propositions that had once defined it in the eyes of the world: The idea that individuals are entitled to a basic set of freedoms that should be applied equally to all people. The idea that democratic governance will compel a society to organize itself around a common set of facts. The idea that people of different races, religions, and ethnicities can peacefully coexist by forging a common sense of identity. The lifelines offered to those who struggled for those things in their own spaces... validated by the results that America itself could produce. We did big things.
Over the past thirty years, we had lost our grip on that lifeline.
From the book After the Fall, Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes
www.amazon.com/s?k=ben+rhodes
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Are you an Independent? An "Independent" who votes almost exclusively for Republicans is not independent.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm not a Republican, and I haven't lost my mind.
Technical Note: Voting for 3rd party candidates doesn't make you "Independent" because voting for candidates who can't win is effectively the same as you can't vote.
I vote for whoever I like. I've voted for a lot of Democrats in my life. I still do to this day, particularly on the local level. I benefit from living in a state where the Democrats are centrists, and not insane fringe Leftists like in California, New York and Illinois. It just so happens that in the last decade I vote for more Republicans than Democrats.
But I sure as hell wasn't going to vote for a Democrat for Indiana Governor last time... Not in 2020, but Holcomb has to go. Rainwater, the Libertarian candidate got 11.4% of the vote this time, which was up nearly 8% from what the Libertarian got the prior election.
I still think that anybody who has ever pressed that button to vote Party Line should have their right to vote revoked. I'm assuming that includes you. You shouldn't be allowed to vote. You're too stupid to vote.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How Authoritarianism Spread And The U.S. Faltered As A Model For Democracy
If you have a problem with Authoritarianism, fix your fucking party.
And then tell them to go after Big Tech.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:There is a problem, but you are unaware of it. A historian named Peter Turchin studied beetles before he switched to history. Bark beetles and bean beetles, which killed forests and crops. The pest beetles are unaware of being an ecological problem. Then Turchin switched to studying humans. Certain kinds of pesky humans, like beetles, lack self-awareness as they destroy societies:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
How Authoritarianism Spread And The U.S. Faltered As A Model For Democracy
If you have a problem with Authoritarianism, fix your fucking party.
And then tell them to go after Big Tech.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
A historian believes he has discovered iron laws that predict the rise and fall of societies. He has bad news: Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst. . . .
In the United States, Turchin told me, you can see more and more aspirants fighting for a single job at, say, a prestigious law firm, or in an influential government sinecure, or (here it got personal) at a national magazine. Perhaps seeing the holes in my T-shirt, Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one. (He doesn’t view himself as a member of either. A professor reaches at most a few hundred students, he told me. “You reach hundreds of thousands.”) Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country. “You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.
Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of previous administrations, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes because the Groton-Yale establishment simply didn’t have any vacancies. Trump’s former adviser and chief strategist Steve Bannon, Turchin said, is a “paradigmatic example” of a counter-elite. He grew up working-class, went to Harvard Business School, and got rich as an investment banker and by owning a small stake in the syndication rights to Seinfeld. None of that translated to political power until he allied himself with the common people. “He was a counter-elite who used Trump to break through, to put the white working males back in charge,” Turchin said.
Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising insecurity becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.
Turchin’s prognostications would be easier to dismiss as barstool theorizing if the disintegration were not happening now, roughly as the Seer of Storrs foretold 10 years ago. If the next 10 years are as seismic as he says they will be, his insights will have to be accounted for by historians and social scientists—assuming, of course, that there are still universities left to employ such people.
----
After its long adolescence of collecting and cataloging, ecology
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Quote:What does the word "like" mean for you, 6ix, because you can't know a politician well enough to "like" them socially. You have to "like" for some other reasons. You "like" their policy? You "like" their party? You "like" a tax cheating scoundrel?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I vote for whoever I like. I've voted for a lot of Democrats in my life. I still do to this day, particularly on the local level. I benefit from living in a state where the Democrats are centrists, and not insane fringe Leftists like in California, New York and Illinois. It just so happens that in the last decade I vote for more Republicans than Democrats.
But I sure as hell wasn't going to vote for a Democrat for Indiana Governor last time... Not in 2020, but Holcomb has to go. Rainwater, the Libertarian candidate got 11.4% of the vote this time, which was up nearly 8% from what the Libertarian got the prior election.
The voters of Indiana didn't agree with you that Gov. Eric Holcomb has to go. Holcomb got 51.38% of the vote in 2016. His "likeability" must have increased because he got 56.51% in 2020. When Libertarian Donald Rainwater received 11.44% of the votes proves nothing about Gov. Eric Holcomb being "unlikable" but does prove that 11.44% of voters don't understand that Libertarians lose elections. The 11.44% should have not voted for anybody rather than a Libertarian who cannot win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Holcomb#Electoral_history
Libertarians do NOT win. By voting for a Libertarian, the message the voter is sending is that they don't understand a damn thing about how a winner-takes-all election system works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Party_(United_States)#Libert
arians_in_office
Why Libertarians Lose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality_voting#Fewer_political_parties
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I vote for whoever I like.Quote:
What does the word "like" mean for you, 6ix,
I'll rephrase it to mean what I meant to say...
"I vote for whoever I like to vote for."
Quote:
because you can't know a politician well enough to "like" them socially.
The same works with hate, you stupid fuck.
--------------------------------------------------
Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:If you're anything like Texas Trumptards, you've avoided the reality about yourself all your life, except when reality punches your face or stabs you in the back or rots out your teeth. Most Trumptards, almost without exception, say things are going well. 6ix says it. I'd believe 6ix, except for the Trumptards I know things are NOT going well. Why do Trumptards say what is false? Maybe they don't know any better? Maybe nobody can convince them to stop? Trump knows perfectly well his Trumptards cared very little about the truth or about honestly paying their taxes. I'm certain, from decades of experience with them in war and peace and business, that Trumptards will do what pleases them and the results will often be crappy, but they can't tell the difference because they aren't as smart and sane as they imagine themselves, avoiding reality. It's why Trumptards struggle to stay in the middle class. Avoiding reality. It's why things are forever going wrong in their lives and it couldn't be their fault. It's the Democrats' fault! Always those mean Democrats triggering Trumptards' anger at the world and reality!
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:Could say the same about a lot of minority "communities" and post-reality libtards living in mom and dad's basement, with useless psychology degrees and a lot of student loan debt.
Originally posted by second:Quote:If you're anything like Texas Trumptards, you've avoided the reality about yourself all your life, except when reality punches your face or stabs you in the back or rots out your teeth. Most Trumptards, almost without exception, say things are going well. 6ix says it. I'd believe 6ix, except for the Trumptards I know things are NOT going well. Why do Trumptards say what is false? Maybe they don't know any better? Maybe nobody can convince them to stop? Trump knows perfectly well his Trumptards cared very little about the truth or about honestly paying their taxes. I'm certain, from decades of experience with them in war and peace and business, that Trumptards will do what pleases them and the results will often be crappy, but they can't tell the difference because they aren't as smart and sane as they imagine themselves, avoiding reality. It's why Trumptards struggle to stay in the middle class. Avoiding reality. It's why things are forever going wrong in their lives and it couldn't be their fault. It's the Democrats' fault! Always those mean Democrats triggering Trumptards' anger at the world and reality!
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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Quote:You could say a lot of things, and Trumptards do because it's one of their defining characteristics, but you'd be trying to mislead. This is true: Once again, America is becoming a nation of drunks
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Could say the same about a lot of minority "communities" and post-reality libtards living in mom and dad's basement, with useless psychology degrees and a lot of student loan debt.
Few things are more American than drinking heavily. But worrying about how heavily other Americans are drinking is one of them.
The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock because, the crew feared, the Pilgrims were going through the beer too quickly. The ship had been headed for the mouth of the Hudson River, until its sailors (who, like most Europeans of that time, preferred beer to water) panicked at the possibility of running out before they got home, and threatened mutiny. And so the Pilgrims were kicked ashore, short of their intended destination and beerless. William Bradford complained bitterly about the latter in his diary that winter, which is really saying something when you consider what trouble the group was in. (Barely half would survive until spring.) Before long, they were not only making their own beer but also importing wine and liquor. Still, within a couple of generations, Puritans like Cotton Mather were warning that a “flood of RUM” could “overwhelm all good Order among us.”
George Washington first won elected office, in 1758, by getting voters soused. (He is said to have given them 144 gallons of alcohol, enough to win him 307 votes and a seat in Virginia’s House of Burgesses.) During the Revolutionary War, he used the same tactic to keep troops happy, and he later became one of the country’s leading whiskey distillers. But he nonetheless took to moralizing when it came to other people’s drinking, which in 1789 he called “the ruin of half the workmen in this Country.”
Hypocritical though he was, Washington had a point. The new country was on a bender, and its drinking would only increase in the years that followed. By 1830, the average American adult was consuming about three times the amount we drink today. An obsession with alcohol’s harms understandably followed, starting the country on the long road to Prohibition.
What’s distinctly American about this story is not alcohol’s prominent place in our history (that’s true of many societies), but the zeal with which we’ve swung between extremes. Americans tend to drink in more dysfunctional ways than people in other societies, only to become judgmental about nearly any drinking at all. Again and again, an era of overindulgence begets an era of renunciation: Binge, abstain. Binge, abstain.
. . . this longing for oblivion resulted from America’s almost unprecedented pace of change between 1790 and 1830. Thanks to rapid westward migration in the years before railroads, canals, and steamboats, more Americans lived in isolation and independence than ever before or since. Meanwhile, in the more densely populated East the old social hierarchies evaporated, cities mushroomed, and industrialization upended the labor market, leading to profound social dislocation and a mismatch between skills and jobs. The resulting epidemics of loneliness and anxiety led people to numb their pain with alcohol.
The temperance movement that took off in the decades that followed was a more rational (and multifaceted) response to all of this than it tends to look like in the rearview mirror. Rather than pushing for full prohibition, many advocates supported some combination of personal moderation, bans only on hard liquor, and regulation of those who profited off alcohol. Nor was temperance a peculiarly American obsession. As Mark Lawrence Schrad shows in his new book, Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition, concerns about distilled liquor’s impact were international: As many as two dozen countries enacted some form of prohibition.
Yet the version tha
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The Changing Composition of Support for Left and Right Parties
by Pranab Bardhan
Some decades back the typical voting pattern in many democracies used to be that the rich and upper middle classes used to vote in general for right-leaning parties, while the relatively poor voted for left-leaning parties. But in recent decades this pattern has been shifting: many of the professional or more educated voters in some of those countries are increasingly going for left or green parties, while many of the poor working-class voters are turning to right-wing parties, sometimes led by populist demagogues. Thomas Piketty and his associates in a new paper issued by the World Inequality Lab have provided data to show that for 21 western democracies the more educated voters have over the years become more left supporters than the less-educated voters. Piketty has described this elite division between high-education and high-income people colorfully as that between the Brahmin Left and the Merchant Right. He does not go much into explaining this pattern but it is clear that as education expands (measured by average years of schooling of the adult population) the left or center-left parties now can have a viable base even in the relatively rich or upper middle classes. Education often makes one appreciate more liberal values, which may sometimes outweigh their worries about higher taxes that the left parties may inflict.
But this still leaves unexplained why the less-educated poor are leaning right.
More at https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2021/06/the-changing-composition
-of-support-for-left-and-right-parties.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:What I posted was true
SIGNYM:
Could say the same about a lot of minority "communities" and post-reality libtards living in mom and dad's basement, with useless psychology degrees and a lot of student loan debt.
SECPMDRATE: You could say a lot of things, and Trumptards do because it's one of their defining characteristics, but you'd be trying to mislead.
Quote:Why do you hate Americans so much, SECONDRATE?
SECONDRATE: This is true: Once again, America is becoming a nation of drunks ... American ... drinking heavily... Mayflower .... beer... RUM... ... George Washington ... alcohol...blah blah blah ... and let me toss in a few more distrators so I can avoid having to address SIGNY'S point as much as possible ...
American ... alcohol ...
And do you really think that nobody notices that when your brain has run dry of rebuttal (which is most of the time) that you fling irrelevant shit against the wall, hoping something will stick?
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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It all stems from how much he hates himself and his own life.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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How to Make Rational Mammals / Reasoning as a Social Project
(but you can't let retards work on your projects unless you crave project failure)
Reasoning well about what is true profiteth a mammal little. It does not reliably help a mammal in its selfish strivings, since it is often better for the mammal to believe all sorts of falsehoods that give it undue confidence (hope), or steer it clear of dangers (superstition), or hate its competitors (envy and jealousy). Nor does reasoning well about what is true help the mammal in terms of sociability, since a mammal is often more sociable by being stubbornly loyal to its clan (tribalism), or by taking on risks or burdens on behalf of the group (altruism), or caring for those who offer it no advantage (selfless love). Selfishness, sociability, and rationality: pick two, but you can’t have all three.
Given this predicament, we will have to give up on the original goal and settle for a next-best alternative, which is to create groups that reason well about what’s true, instead of individuals. This we can do. We first have to make sure our mammals have different opinions about what’s true. (Good news: this turns out to be easy to achieve.) Second, we have to have them talk to one another (already done). Third, we have to have them want to persuade one another to adopt the persuader’s opinion. This seems to accord pretty well with selfishness. But what counts as “acceptable means of persuasion” will have to be tempered somewhat to meet the requirements of sociability: if we allow for threats of force or bullying then we place our group’s cohesion at risk. So in the end we will need to establish social standards which tell us when we should or shouldn’t change our minds, on the basis of the claims our fellow mammals make. We can identify these standards as reason, near enough.
What we will get in the end are mammals who do not reason very well on their own — they fall into hope, superstition, envy, and other familiar mammalian foibles — but who reason exceptionally well in groups. Mammal A puts forward an opinion, only to be challenged by mammal B, with mammals C and D looking on, and a great many words are exchanged; in the end the group settles on an opinion which may be A’s, or someone else’s, or a new one that no one had considered before. But there begins to emerge a sense of what is right to conclude, independently of any individual’s opinion. We have at least a social process that functions in the way that “reason” is supposed to, even if we haven’t established that what counts as “right to conclude” is exactly the same as reasoning well about what is true.
. . . This overall engineering of mammalian reason is the account Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber offer in their 2017 book, The Enigma of Reason. The “enigma” they seek to explain is how humans are both fantastic and lousy reasoners. Humans, as we know, have calculus and the standard model and economic strategies and chess; but they also buy lottery tickets and adopt conspiracy theories and fail at all sorts of tasks set by crafty psychologists. Mercier and Sperber argue that we need to think of reasoning as a group project rather than as an oracle housed in each brain.
. . . Two interesting consequences follow from this view of reasoning as a social project. The first is that the individualistic ideal of human beings as free and independent judges of what is reasonable and true does not accord well with what we know ourselves to be. We need each other in order to reason well;
More at https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2021/06/how-to-make-rational-mam
mals.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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These myths about Social Security are drawing attention from what’s really going on
Talking with family and friends, listening to cable news or following public debate about the future of Social Security, you’ve likely heard one or more of the following comments asserted as incontrovertible fact:
Social Security is going bankrupt, going broke, in crisis; young people will never see a penny in benefits.
Social Security’s trust funds are simply an accounting gimmick, worthless IOUs.
Social Security is unsustainable. There just will not be enough working-age people to support retired boomers.
Social Security is unfair to younger Americans.
Here is a point-by-point refutation of each of these assertions and how these claims undermine confidence in the future of Social Security and distract attention from what is really going on.
More at https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-myths-about-social-security-ar
e-drawing-attention-from-whats-really-going-on-11622834550
The article does not say but the spreaders of these myths are Trumptards. I wonder what happened to those who lean Republican, even if they don’t always vote for only Republicans, to make them this way?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
These myths about Social Security are drawing attention from what’s really going on
Talking with family and friends, listening to cable news or following public debate about the future of Social Security, you’ve likely heard one or more of the following comments asserted as incontrovertible fact:
Social Security is going bankrupt, going broke, in crisis; young people will never see a penny in benefits.
Social Security’s trust funds are simply an accounting gimmick, worthless IOUs.
Social Security is unsustainable. There just will not be enough working-age people to support retired boomers.
Social Security is unfair to younger Americans.
Here is a point-by-point refutation of each of these assertions and how these claims undermine confidence in the future of Social Security and distract attention from what is really going on.
More at https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-myths-about-social-security-ar
e-drawing-attention-from-whats-really-going-on-11622834550
The article does not say but the spreaders of these myths are Trumptards. I wonder what happened to those who lean Republican, even if they don’t always vote for only Republicans, to make them this way?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Shut up Boomer. Your generation paid half what mine will, and your parents didn't pay shit into it.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:I've been paying into Social Security since I was a 13 year old working for my father at Burger King in 1965. Except for then and in the military and a half year in the VA hospital and then another year back at Burger King working for my father, again, as a full grown adult and then summer work in college, I have always paid the maximum amount into Social Security. I will get the maximum payment back from Social Security, too, a lousy $3,895 per month when I turn 70 in 2022. I will have to live to be about 110 to get back all the money I paid into Social Security. It is a program to support poor white trash Trumptards like you, 6ix. They are the ones who are getting a cheap ride. They are also the ones spreading falsehoods about Social Security.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Shut up Boomer. Your generation paid half what mine will, and your parents didn't pay shit into it.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/cbb.html
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/examplemax.html
(By the way I will still be paying into SS after I "retire" because I will still be working. You should try working, 6ix. It will get you out of the house more often.)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:I was only in SS for a few years, not enuf to be able to draw from it on retirement, so there's money I'll never gr back. (I was contributing to a county-based social security-like retirement plan, however.)
Originally posted by second:Quote:I've have been paying into Social Security since I was a 13 year old working for my father at Burger King in 1965. Except for then and in the military and a half year in the VA hospital and then another year back at Burger King working for my father, again, as a full grown adult and then summer work in college, I have always paid the maximum amount into Social Security. I will get the maximum payment back from Social Security, too, a lousy $3,895 per month when I turn 70 in 2022. I will have to live to be about 110 to get back all the money I paid into Social Security. It is a program to support poor white trash Trumptards like you, 6ix. They are the ones who are getting a cheap ride. They are also the ones spreading falsehoods about Social Security.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Shut up Boomer. Your generation paid half what mine will, and your parents didn't pay shit into it.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/cbb.html
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/examplemax.html
(By the way I will still be paying into SS after I "retire" because I will still be working. You should try working, 6ix. It will get you out of the house more often.)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Like SECOND, hubby has been paying the max into Social Security, and there's no way in hell he'll ever get that back. It is a transfer of wealth from high wage workers to low wage retirees. Isn't that what you wanted, SIX?
BTW, I agree with SECOND: You need to start working again. You can't live off Covid stimulous checks, unemployment, and your nest egg forever. I know that you're hoping t make money when you sell your house (and I hope you make beaucoup bucks and get paid for all that work that you're putting into it) but you don't know what the market's going to be like when you sell, and your savings should be going up, not down, if you want to secure your future.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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A character in Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel, Freedom, puts it this way: “If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life.”
How America Fractured Into Four Parts
People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?
Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost. But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts—they need stories that convey a moral identity. The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up.
Tracing the evolution of these narratives can tell you something about a nation’s possibilities for change. Through much of the 20th century, the two political parties had clear identities and told distinct stories. The Republicans spoke for those who wanted to get ahead, and the Democrats spoke for those who wanted a fair shake. Republicans emphasized individual enterprise, and Democrats emphasized social solidarity, eventually including Black people and abandoning the party’s commitment to Jim Crow. But, unlike today, the two parties were arguing over the same recognizable country. This arrangement held until the late ’60s—still within living memory.
The two parties reflected a society that was less free than today, less tolerant, and far less diverse, with fewer choices, but with more economic equality, more shared prosperity, and more political cooperation. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats played important roles in their respective parties. Americans then were more uniform than we are in what they ate (tuna noodle casserole) and what they watched (Bullitt). Even their bodies looked more alike. They were more restrained than we are, more repressed—though restraint and repression were coming undone by 1968.
Since then, the two parties have just about traded places. By the turn of the millennium, the Democrats were becoming the home of affluent professionals, while the Republicans were starting to sound like populist insurgents. We have to understand this exchange in order to grasp how we got to where we are.
The 1970s ended postwar, bipartisan, middle-class America, and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake. In their place, four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America’s moral identity. They have roots in history, but they are shaped by new ways of thinking and living. They reflect schisms on both sides of the divide that has made us two countries, extending and deepening the lines of fracture. Over the past four decades, the four narratives have taken turns exercising influence. They overlap, morph into one another, attract and repel one another. None can be understood apart from the others, because all four emerge from the same whole.
Part 1 about How America Fractured Into Four Parts.
Call the first narrative “Free America.” In the past half century it’s been the most politically powerful of the four. Free America draws on libertarian ideas, which it installs in the high-powered engine of consumer capitalism. The freedom it champions is very different from Alexis de Tocqueville’s art of self-government. It’s personal freedom, without other people—the negative liberty of “Don’t trea
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When SS started, it was 1% of your pay being taxed.
Now, with Medicare included, it's 15.3% of your wages.
That's because all of the boomers coming from families of 5 kids are drawing it, and it was a pyramid scheme from the beginning. Just another in an endless string of bubbles we are great at making here.
I have no intention of working again unless it's absolutely necessary. White males without college degrees at my age can't even get a decent job anymore, and I've started from the bottom and worked my way up to nearly 60k per year twice only to have that job disappear.
The last year has been one of the best and most productive of my life.
If our government were able to do 10% of the good I've done with almost nothing coming in during that time, we'd be running the world for the next 10,000 years.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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What the Rich Don’t Want to Admit About the Poor
The American economy runs on poverty, or at least the constant threat of it. Americans like their goods cheap and their services plentiful and the two of them, together, require a sprawling labor force willing to work tough jobs at crummy wages. On the right, the barest glimmer of worker power is treated as a policy emergency, and the whip of poverty, not the lure of higher wages, is the appropriate response.
Reports that low-wage employers were having trouble filling open jobs sent Republican policymakers into a tizzy and led at least 25 Republican governors — and one Democratic governor — to announce plans to cut off expanded unemployment benefits early. Chipotle said that it would increase prices by about 4 percent to cover the cost of higher wages, prompting the National Republican Congressional Committee to issue a blistering response: “Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage, and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill.” The Trumpist outlet The Federalist complained, “Restaurants have had to bribe current and prospective workers with fatter paychecks to lure them off their backsides and back to work.”
But it’s not just the right. The financial press, the cable news squawkers and even many on the center-left greet news of labor shortages and price increases with an alarm they rarely bring to the ongoing agonies of poverty or low-wage toil.
As it happened, just as I was watching Republican governors try to immiserate low-wage workers who weren’t yet jumping at the chance to return to poorly ventilated kitchens for $9 an hour, I was sent “A Guaranteed Income for the 21st Century,” a plan that seeks to make poverty a thing of the past. The proposal, developed by Darrick Hamilton, would guarantee a $12,500 annual income for every adult and a $4,500 allowance for every child. It’s what wonks call a “negative income tax” plan — unlike a universal basic income, it phases out as households rise into the middle class.
“With poverty, to address it, you just eliminate it,” Hamilton told me. “You give people enough resources so they’re not poor.” Simple, but not cheap. The team estimates that its proposal would cost $876 billion annually. To give a sense of scale, total federal spending in 2019 was about $4.4 trillion, with $1 trillion of that financing Social Security payments and another $1.1 trillion support Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
I’m less blasé about financing a program that would increase federal spending by almost 20 percent, but at the same time, it’s clearly possible. Even if the entire thing was funded by taxes, it would only bring America’s tax burden to roughly the average of our peer nations.
I suspect the real political problem for a guaranteed income isn’t the costs, but the benefits. A policy like this would give workers the power to make real choices. They could say no to a job they didn’t want, or quit one that exploited them. They could, and would, demand better wages, or take time off to attend school or simply to rest. When we spoke, Hamilton tried to sell it to me as a truer form of capitalism. “People can’t reap the returns of their effort without some baseline level of resources,” he said. “If you lack basic necessities with regards to economic well-being, you have no agency. You’re dictated to by others or live in a miserable state.”
But those in the economy with the power to do the dictating profit from the desperation of low-wage workers. One man’s misery is another man’s quick and affordable at-home lunch delivery. “It is a fact that when we pay workers less and don’t have social insurance programs that, say, cover Uber and Lyft drivers, we are able to consume goods and services at lower prices,” Hilary Hoynes, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, where she also co-directs the Opportunity Lab, told me.
This
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I'm sure we're going to hear more about this as unemployment benefits start dropping off 12 weeks early in the 25 states that ended them, which can be particularly problematic among states that haven't entirely reopened and banned vaccine passports. Particularly those with large minority populations.
I'm surprised how little coverage that has gotten.
It will though.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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A Republican controlled Senate will never again confirm another Democrat Supreme Court Justice
On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he would refuse to let President Joe Biden fill a Supreme Court seat in 2024 if Republicans win the Senate next year. McConnell also suggested that he would not let Biden fill a Supreme Court vacancy in 2023, even if the president nominated “a normal mainstream liberal.” These comments are not remotely surprising. The Republican Party has outsourced much of its agenda to the federal judiciary, a strategy that requires its lawmakers to ruthlessly extinguish Democrats’ influence over the courts. To that end, a GOP-controlled Senate will never again confirm a Democratic president’s Supreme Court nominee. Not in an election year or any other year. Not in your lifetime or mine. Never.
McConnell played slightly coy when discussing the possibility of a Supreme Court confirmation in 2023, telling Hewitt: “Well, we’d have to wait and see what happens.” But anyone who seriously believes a Republican-controlled Senate would confirm a Biden nominee that year—or even hold hearings on one—is deluding themselves. McConnell’s approach to judicial confirmations reflects two core principles of the modern GOP: first, that only the federal judiciary can impose key items in the Republican Party platform that are too unpopular to pass through the democratic process; and second, that only conservative judges faithfully apply the Constitution, whereas liberals make it up as they go along.
These principles might appear to contradict each other. But Republicans have harmonized them by convincing themselves that their platform perfectly reflects the Constitution. Thus, in the eyes of the GOP, when liberal judges issue decisions that align with Democrats’ priorities, they are judicial activists who are betraying their duty to apply the law as written. When conservative judges issue decisions that align with Republicans’ priorities, by contrast, they are independent jurists who are honoring the Framers’ design.
More at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/06/mcconnell-biden-breyer-sup
reme-court.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Guess you're not getting your court packed either, huh?
Biden* isn't doing anything he told you he was going to do, is he?
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:McConnell’s move, like everything he does, is calculated. First of all, it helps unite a fractious Republican base, which cares deeply about conservative jurists – and views McConnell’s blocking of Merrick Garland in 2016 as a moment of triumph.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Guess you're not getting your court packed either, huh?
Biden* isn't doing anything he told you he was going to do, is he?
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
Second, it is likely to stir up the Democratic base – and confirm that Breyer needs to retire and Biden needs to fill the opening created ASAP. Which could well impact Breyer’s ultimate decision.
Breyer may announce at the end of this term – which will be at the end of this month – that he is retiring. He'll be 83 in August. But if he decides to stay on an extra year so that he can be another Ruth Bader Ginsburg dying on the job, the fight for control of the Senate next year will have epically large stakes in the Supreme Court.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:McConnell’s move, like everything he does, is calculated. First of all, it helps unite a fractious Republican base, which cares deeply about conservative jurists – and views McConnell’s blocking of Merrick Garland in 2016 as a moment of triumph.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Guess you're not getting your court packed either, huh?
Biden* isn't doing anything he told you he was going to do, is he?
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
Second, it is likely to stir up the Democratic base – and confirm that Breyer needs to retire and Biden needs to fill the opening created ASAP. Which could well impact Breyer’s ultimate decision.
Breyer may announce at the end of this term – which will be at the end of this month – that he is retiring. He'll be 83 in August. But if he decides to stay on an extra year so that he can be another Ruth Bader Ginsburg dying on the job, the fight for control of the Senate next year will have epically large stakes in the Supreme Court.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Didn't answer my question, so I didn't need to be quoted.
Stop quoting people then posting unrelated shit, dummy.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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The railroads were the first great crony capitalists. They bought politicians, bribed judges, and, in Henry Adams’s phrase, turned themselves into ‘local despotisms’ in one state after another. In the 1860s, when railroads helped the North subdue the South, Congress repeatedly gave away parcels of land the size of northeastern states. Gifts to the Union Pacific were, cumulatively, equivalent to New Hampshire and New Jersey combined. By one scholar’s estimate, if all the land given to railroads in that decade were cobbled into one state, it would be the third largest, smaller than Alaska and Texas but larger than California.
https://roanoke.com/opinion/columnists/will-is-the-america-of-today-ev
en-capable-of-performing-great-building-feats/article_b37f18bc-ca4a-11eb-99a2-43d85e1e038c.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
A character in Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel, Freedom, puts it this way: “If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life.”
How America Fractured Into Four Parts
People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?
Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost. But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts—they need stories that convey a moral identity. The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up.
Tracing the evolution of these narratives can tell you something about a nation’s possibilities for change. Through much of the 20th century, the two political parties had clear identities and told distinct stories. The Republicans spoke for those who wanted to get ahead, and the Democrats spoke for those who wanted a fair shake. Republicans emphasized individual enterprise, and Democrats emphasized social solidarity, eventually including Black people and abandoning the party’s commitment to Jim Crow. But, unlike today, the two parties were arguing over the same recognizable country. This arrangement held until the late ’60s—still within living memory.
The two parties reflected a society that was less free than today, less tolerant, and far less diverse, with fewer choices, but with more economic equality, more shared prosperity, and more political cooperation. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats played important roles in their respective parties. Americans then were more uniform than we are in what they ate (tuna noodle casserole) and what they watched (Bullitt). Even their bodies looked more alike. They were more restrained than we are, more repressed—though restraint and repression were coming undone by 1968.
Since then, the two parties have just about traded places. By the turn of the millennium, the Democrats were becoming the home of affluent professionals, while the Republicans were starting to sound like populist insurgents. We have to understand this exchange in order to grasp how we got to where we are.
The 1970s ended postwar, bipartisan, middle-class America, and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake. In their place, four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America’s moral identity. They have roots in history, but they are shaped by new ways of thinking and living. They reflect schisms on both sides of the divide that has made us two countries, extending and deepening the lines of fracture. Over the past four decades, the four narratives have taken turns exercising influence. They overlap, morph into one another, attract and repel one another. None can be understood apart from the others, because all four emerge from the same whole.
Part 1 about How America Fractured Into Four Parts.
Call the first narrative “Free America.” In the past half century it’s been the most politically powerful of the four. Free America draws on libertarian ideas, which it installs in the high-powered engine of consumer capitalism. The freedom it champions is very different from Alexis de Tocqueville’s art of self-government. It’s personal freedom, without other pe
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He is right about the two parties trading places though.
It's something that I've said for a LONG time here.
Funny how second seems to ignore that part of the passage he posted being a lifelong Democrat and all, innit?
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:The American pie is getting so much smaller. It's no wonder Americans are primed to try and feed off of the 'other'.
Just popping this up for discussion. Those four parts don't necessarily collide; they're not mutually exclusive. This is just another brainiac-sounding way to divide people up even further.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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Quote:
SECOND:
How America Fractured Into Four Parts
People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?
Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost. But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts—they need stories that convey a moral identity. The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up.
Since then, the two parties have just about traded places. By the turn of the millennium, the Democrats were becoming the home of affluent professionals, while the Republicans were starting to sound like populist insurgents. We have to understand this exchange in order to grasp how we got to where we are.
The 1970s ended postwar, bipartisan, middle-class America, and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake. In their place, four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America’s moral identity. They have roots in history, but they are shaped by new ways of thinking and living. They reflect schisms on both sides of the divide that has made us two countries, extending and deepening the lines of fracture. Over the past four decades, the four narratives have taken turns exercising influence. They overlap, morph into one another, attract and repel one another. None can be understood apart from the others, because all four emerge from the same whole.
...
More about fractured American Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 at https://web.archive.org/web/20210609154909if_/https://www.theatlantic.
com/magazine/archive/2021/07/george-packer-four-americas/619012/
Impatient readers jump to the end of the essay: All four narratives are also driven by a competition for status that generates fierce anxiety and resentment. They all anoint winners and losers. In Free America, the winners are the makers, and the losers are the takers who want to drag the rest down in perpetual dependency on a smothering government. In Smart America, the winners are the credentialed meritocrats, and the losers are the poorly educated who want to resist inevitable progress. In Real America, the winners are the hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland, and the losers are treacherous elites and contaminating others who want to destroy the country. In Just America, the winners are the marginalized groups, and the losers are the dominant groups that want to go on dominating.
. . . we remain trapped in two countries. Each one is split by two narratives—Smart and Just on one side, Free and Real on the other. Neither separation nor conquest is a tenable future. The tensions within each country will persist even as the cold civil war between them rages on.
This essay is adapted from George Packer’s new book, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374603663
SECOND: Just popping this up for discussion. Those four parts don't necessarily collide; they're not mutually exclusive. This is just another brainiac-sounding way to divide people up even further.
People work for reward. Our old narratives are breaking down because we are actually living in the realm of a FIFTH narrative, one which the elites have been steadily imposing on us for decades, and that is WORK DOESN'T PAY. BECOME A CONSUMER/USELESS EATER. GO INTO DEBT. WHINGE ABOUT "OTHERS" HAVING MORE PRIVILEGE.
But here's the thing: Thr
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Quote:I will show you a map to my life: https://goo.gl/maps/SkseYXJVEMPsmGMV7
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
People work for reward. Our old narratives are breaking down because we are actually living in the realm of a FIFTH narrative, one which the elites have been steadily imposing on us for decades, and that is WORK DOESN'T PAY. BECOME A CONSUMER/USELESS EATER. GO INTO DEBT. WHINGE ABOUT "OTHERS" HAVING MORE PRIVILEGE. . . .
At one end is NASA. The other end is Taylor Lake Village where I had a house on the lake. I've talked to many people who had worked at NASA during the Apollo years. They had a purpose, a drive, a meaningful life, at least until Nixon, who didn't give a damn about the space program, other than as a way to win a few votes with aerospace contracts, killed purpose, meaning, life. America would be a much better place today if the space program hadn't lost most of its purpose fifty years ago when it shifted money to that overpriced Space Shuttle. The good old days are long gone because of politicians like Richard Nixon. He made the whole country poorer with his bad judgement, but especially he made the poorer half poorer than they could have been.
There are programs other than space that could keep America motivated and improve many poorer Americans' lives. One example: Is anybody interested in saving the world from climate change? But there is too much political opposition to that or any other thing that looks like a moonshot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Background
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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How about - yanno - basic and advanced INDUSTRY?
Like steel manufacturing and chip fabrication? Textiles and rare earth mining?
What's that, you say? That would mean government would have to get its sticky fingers into PRIVATE INDUSTRIES - like, maybe, yours? ... Because industries are no longer serving the country or its people?
Pobrecito
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Boy, have you got a grotch against Nixon, or what?? Nixon, you may recall, started a whole 'nother meaningful endeavor, and that was the EPA. As far as being the "big baddie" in xfering wealth to the wealthy, I think that prize goes to Obama.
Anyway, I should have picked a different word than "meaningful". I don't meaningful to the person who performs it, I mean meaningful to the society at large: People generally agree that the work is useful for society as a whole. Growing food is meaningful. Making steel, chemicals, cement, chips, cloth, glass is meaningful (or should be). Teaching and healing is meaningful. Pollution control, energy conservation, environmental remediation is meaningful. Building bridges, repairing roads, renovating houses and waterworks and pipes is meaningful. Protecting our borders is meaningful. Enforcing just laws equally is meaningful.
Much of that has been made meaningless by the elite, which is why recovering the narrative is meaningful.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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Quote:Don't blame me. I was a construction engineer building petrochemical plants here and overseas. After that, I was selling natural gas and cattle in America. All those careers are based in the U.S.A. Product is made here, or grown here, and sold here or to foreigners. But it is not possible for more than a few hundred thousand people to make a living the way I did. One class of jobs requiring many millions of working Americans: saving the world from climate change. Those millions of jobs won't be created because of political opposition to spending the money.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
How about - yanno - basic and advanced INDUSTRY?
Like steel manufacturing and chip fabrication? Textiles and rare earth mining?
What's that, you say? That would mean government would have to get its sticky fingers into PRIVATE INDUSTRIES - like, maybe, yours? ... Because industries are no longer serving the country or its people?
Republican policy on climate change: "Planning for our energy future requires us to first determine what resources we have in reserve. Thirty years ago, the world’s estimated reserves of oil were 645 billion barrels. Today, that figure is 1.65 trillion barrels. The more we know what we will have in the future, the better we can decide how to use it."
"The Democratic Party does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource. Those who mine it and their families should be protected from the Democratic Party’s radical anticoal agenda."
"The environmental establishment has become a self-serving elite, stuck in the mindset of the 1970s, subordinating the public’s consensus to the goals of the Democratic Party. Their approach is based on shoddy science, scare tactics, and centralized command-and-control regulation."
"We will likewise forbid the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide, something never envisioned when Congress passed the Clean Air Act."
"Information concerning a changing climate, especially projections into the long-range future, must be based on dispassionate analysis of hard data. We will enforce that standard throughout the executive branch, among civil servants and presidential appointees alike. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution. Its unreliability is reflected in its intolerance toward scientists and others who dissent from its orthodoxy. We will evaluate its recommendations accordingly. We reject the agendas of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, which represent only the personal commitments of their signatories; no such agreement can be binding upon the United States until it is submitted to and ratified by the Senate."
More at www.gop.com/platform/americas-natural-resources/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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And what if the government were to set internal and export gas prices, to benefit US-based industries? So that your industry would benefit US manufacturing and US workers instead of just ... you?
I'm sure there's a reason why you didn't address basic manufacturing in your answer tho Signy specifically mentioned it; and why focused on government projects. And I'm pretty sure that was intentional, and self-serving.
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Quote:If the government wants to set the price for my natural gas, it can go right ahead. It can't be any worse than what the market does. I take that back: government could set the price so high that most of my customers stop buying, and burning, in order to save the world from climate change. I am pretty damn sure we will have to stop burning fossil fuels or else die while choking on the fumes.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
And what if the government were to set internal and export gas prices, to benefit US-based industries? So that your industry would benefit US manufacturing and US workers instead of just ... you?
I'm sure there's a reason why you didn't address basic manufacturing in your answer tho Signy specifically mentioned it; and why focused on government projects. And I'm pretty sure that was intentional, and self-serving.
The reason why I did NOT focus on manufacturing is that moving all factories from Mexico and Canada and China back to the United States was a Trump talking point. You might not have noticed, but Trump's tariff policy didn't move any jobs back to the United States. I guess moving all those jobs is possible, but it is not possible to do it without setting off a trade war.
Check out 'How many jobs did Trump tariff policy create?' at google https://www.google.com/search?q=How+many+jobs+did+Trump+tariff+policy+
create%3F
The answer I get from google is that Trump's tariff policy did NOT work. But I doubt that voters for Trump would believe Trump failed.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Biden hits roadblocks on path to low-carbon economy
Updated: June 17, 2021 2:17 p.m.
When President Joe Biden announced in April that he was planning to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half over the next nine years, administration officials believed the goal was ambitious but achievable through policies that would accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles and effectively ban power plants from emitting carbon dioxide.
But a series of early setbacks in both court and Congress is providing a reality check for the administration. Biden is quickly finding out that achieving such a sharp drop in emissions over such a short period will be inordinately difficult in the current political climate.
The decision by a Louisiana federal judge Wednesday requiring the Department of Interior to end its pause on oil and gas leasing came as the administration’s plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on electric vehicle charging stations and tax credits was looking unlikely to make it into any bipartisan infrastructure package that might materialize.
And if the administration officials had any question about Republicans willingness to shift the nation away from fossil fuels, they only had to look to Texas where the Republican-controlled state government just passed a law limiting state entities including pension funds from investing with companies seeking to shift investment from fossil fuels.
“How's he doing reworking the entire economy? It's going slowly,” quipped Glenn Schwartz, director of energy policy at the Washington consulting firm Rapidan Group. “His big goals are limited by partisan gridlock in Congress. Going forward he’s going to need to rely on his existing authority as president, but there he’s really just playing at the edges.”
In the days following his inauguration, Biden came out hard on climate change, painting the issue both as an existential crisis for the planet but also one that offered the potential for a clean energy boom that would create new industries and new jobs.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20210617233141/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/energy/article/Biden-hits-roadblocks-on-path-to-low-carbon-16254695.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:So, what were you REWARDED for?
1KIKI:
How about - yanno - basic and advanced INDUSTRY?
Like steel manufacturing and chip fabrication? Textiles and rare earth mining?
What's that, you say? That would mean government would have to get its sticky fingers into PRIVATE INDUSTRIES - like, maybe, yours? ... Because industries are no longer serving the country or its people?
SECOND: Don't blame me. I was a construction engineer building petrochemical plants here and overseas. After that, I was selling natural gas and cattle in America. All those careers are based in the U.S.A. Product is made here, or grown here, and sold here or to foreigners.
Going to Vietnam? Er, not so much. (I wonder what meme that would be under? "Real" America? The kind that believes in freedom, mom, and apple pie?)
Working at McDonald's? Not so much there, either. (That would belong, I suppose, under "Free" America.)
Designing petrochemical plants? Well, moving up the scale, definitely. Prolly somewhere between "Free" America and "Smart" America.
But when did the money REALLY come rolling in??? When you BOUGHT land and became a RENTIER CAPITALIST, "making money in your sleep" simply through the fact of ownership, not effort. What meme does THAT belong in?
It doesn't, because it's the meme we don't talk about.
The meaningful jobs ... raising children, growing food, building buildings, digging ditches, assembling components, trucking goods .... THOSE are relegated to undocumented nannies and agricultural workers and day-laborers and low-wage assembly line workers and "gig economy" services. The stuff that doesn't matter - internet "influencers" and celebrity chefs - get a lot of money.
And the really BIG money goes to the owners.
It's an upside-down reward system that is destroying America.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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lol
$3.30 for gas today.
Welcome to Biden*'s America.
Dems will be out next year, and Biden* will be out on his ass in 2024.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I will show you a map to my life:
FIFY
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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Quote:Presidents don't control gasoline prices:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol
$3.30 for gas today.
Welcome to Biden*'s America.
Dems will be out next year, and Biden* will be out on his ass in 2024.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
US Regular All Formulations Gas Price
Weighted average based on sampling of approximately 900 retail outlets, 8:00AM Monday. The price represents self-service unless only full-service is available and includes all taxes.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=EQ1p
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
If the government blah blah blah ... Trump ... blah blah blah ... Trump .. blah blah blah ... Trump ... Trump ...
Since you refuse to post anything honest, or even on topic, I'm not even going to pretend to discuss this with you.
But, related to Signy's post ...
I think history taught us that corporations have no loyalty to America. They, along with their captive politicians and economic advisors, are the authors of the US's current problems of dependency on China for manufactured goods, the bad Balance of Trade, and crippling debt in all sectors. So in general, it's futile to presume business will fix the problems it has created.
There's also another issue here, and that's the presumption the US government is a business, and that it should be run like a business. But the government isn't a business. It wasn't created to harvest the highest profit possible by any means necessary. Instead its charter is to to 'provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity'. That reads nothing like a corporate prospectus.
I think people need to rethink their assumptions about the US and its various levels of government, and what they should and should not be focused on.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Presidents don't control gasoline prices:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol
$3.30 for gas today.
Welcome to Biden*'s America.
Dems will be out next year, and Biden* will be out on his ass in 2024.
--------------------------------------------------
Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
That doesn't matter.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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We're staring down the barrel of 1970's style inflation. The type of stuff I was fortunate not to have lived through.
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/558555-biden-approaches-economic-p
oint-of-no-return
Biden* is fucked.
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Give me liberty or just come shoot me in my house. I'm so over this ridiculous reality.
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