Echo Trump’s Tough Talk, or Lift Tariffs? Democrats Clash Over Trade
Neither Obama nor any other Democrat is or has lately been a real free trader in the history Republican style.
He is a fair-trader, which means a free-trader with add-ons to protect the environment and workers and otherwise advance social and other liberal goals having nothing much to do with trade per se, and nothing at all to do with protecting American jobs.
The whole tariff thing, however, is true-blue protectionism, and so both stupid and harmful to those slated to go unprotected.
It was the subject of trade, which has become the centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s agenda, that most animated the candidates.
They argued over whether to revisit Obama-era multilateralism or double down on Mr. Trump’s brand of economic isolationism, which has upended how both Republicans and Democrats think about international commerce.
The most striking example of the fissures came during a heated exchange between Senator Elizabeth Warren, a progressive from Massachusetts, and John Delaney, a moderate former congressman from Maryland, during an argument over what should be done about Mr. Trump’s steel tariffs.
“I’m the only one running for president who actually supports the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” Mr. Delaney said, referring to the 12-nation trade pact that Mr. Trump abandoned upon taking office.
“President Obama was right about that. We should be getting back in that.”
Deriding Ms. Warren as an isolationist on trade, he added: “We have to engage.”
Ms. Warren unveiled a trade plan this week that included a raft of strict preconditions on human rights and environmental standards that would be required for kicking off any negotiations with other countries.
On Tuesday night, she vowed to sideline big corporations and make sure that unions, small farmers and environmentalists took priority in future trade talks.
. . . .
For good measure, Ms. Warren went on to assail Mr. Trump’s rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which she called Nafta 2.0, as a giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry that would lead to higher drug prices.
Not to be outdone, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said that he would stop giving military contracts to companies that did not employ American workers to manufacture their products.
“If anybody here thinks that corporate America gives one damn about the average American worker, you’re mistaken,” said Mr. Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist.
“If they can save 5 cents to Mexico or China or Vietnam, that’s what they’ll do.”
As can be easily seen, he really doesn't approve the way capitalism works. The way it essentially works.
<snip>
The more moderate Democrats were more cautious in their attacks on Mr. Trump’s stewardship of the economy, largely taking issue with sluggish income growth and what they called the unfairness of the tax code while criticizing his methods on trade.
For instance, when asked whether they would repeal Mr. Trump’s tariffs on steel imports, most of the 10 candidates hedged.
. . . .
Despite the strength of the economy, some economists argue that it has thrived in spite of Mr. Trump’s agenda.
The trade tensions caused by his tariffs are widely acknowledged to have been a drag on economic growth.
The federal budget deficit has increased an average of 15 percent for each fiscal year he has been in office.
Moreover, Mr. Trump’s handling of trade negotiations has called into question his deal-making prowess.
The overhaul of Nafta is languishing in Congress, where it must be ratified.
A new trade war with Europe is brewing over digital taxes.
Negotiations with China, which resumed this week in Shanghai, appear to be making little progress.
Showing posts with label fair trade. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fair trade. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Friday, October 20, 2017
Lemmings cruising toward a crash?
Velshi and Ruhle, in politically spun news, have once in a while over several weeks been questioning the health of the stock market, reporting that some economists and knowledgeable players see the current phase of our nine year old bull market as a bubble, a rerun of the scene just before the great crash of 2008.
(But where are the bad mortgages?)
Today they pointed out that we are in the region economists think of as full employment, meaning that apart from people changing jobs or voluntarily not working pretty much everybody who wants a job and can be relied upon to do it is working.
And when you are at full employment and a boom continues employers compete for workers by raising wages and benefits.
But that isn't happening to the extent expected or wanted.
Wages and benefits are rising, but more slowly and less than they would have in the past, and that has been the story pretty much throughout this bull market.
Their explanation in part is that automation has been enabling productivity rises without much rise in the market for labor, and little or none for the least skilled.
That part makes sense.
Too, they concede the Sanders/Trump claim that globalization means that importation of cheap goods from overseas has prevented demand from driving up US domestic production of those same or similar goods and thus pushing up US wages.
While that is true, as well, it doesn't mean protectionist policies would not drive up prices more than wages, or that it would not drive up prices paid by Peter while driving up wages paid only to Paul
The last part is that interest rates are too low and are causing a mere bubble in stock values.
That part is doubtful, since too low interest rates would cause notable inflation, and we aren't having that.
(But where are the bad mortgages?)
Today they pointed out that we are in the region economists think of as full employment, meaning that apart from people changing jobs or voluntarily not working pretty much everybody who wants a job and can be relied upon to do it is working.
And when you are at full employment and a boom continues employers compete for workers by raising wages and benefits.
But that isn't happening to the extent expected or wanted.
Wages and benefits are rising, but more slowly and less than they would have in the past, and that has been the story pretty much throughout this bull market.
Their explanation in part is that automation has been enabling productivity rises without much rise in the market for labor, and little or none for the least skilled.
That part makes sense.
Too, they concede the Sanders/Trump claim that globalization means that importation of cheap goods from overseas has prevented demand from driving up US domestic production of those same or similar goods and thus pushing up US wages.
While that is true, as well, it doesn't mean protectionist policies would not drive up prices more than wages, or that it would not drive up prices paid by Peter while driving up wages paid only to Paul
The last part is that interest rates are too low and are causing a mere bubble in stock values.
That part is doubtful, since too low interest rates would cause notable inflation, and we aren't having that.
Thursday, December 22, 2016
So The Duce was not kidding about trade?
The Financial Times, advocate of ever more free trade, doesn't like it at all.
How's this for a headline?
It looks like Trump is serious about starting a trade war with China
A Harvard educated economic nationalist will lead a National Trade Council with a big job.
Not a hint how he can get his own party, dominated by free traders, on board.
But Bernie Sanders might go for it.
If not, it will just highlight what cosmopolitan phonies the fair traders are.
The AP story is not so alarmist.
How's this for a headline?
It looks like Trump is serious about starting a trade war with China
A Harvard educated economic nationalist will lead a National Trade Council with a big job.
Not a hint how he can get his own party, dominated by free traders, on board.
But Bernie Sanders might go for it.
If not, it will just highlight what cosmopolitan phonies the fair traders are.
The AP story is not so alarmist.
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
Protectionism and robots
American workers want to be more expensive than robots, and robots are more expensive than the wildly exploited and exploitable labor of the Third World who have gotten so many American jobs under free trade.
But from the look of it protectionism would protect robots more than workers, or workers only if they agreed to work for little or nothing more than the current going wage - or the price of a good robot.
So the goods the robots or workers got to produce in America, thanks to protectionism, would cost more for American consumers or businesses, but American workers would gain little or nothing by way of better wages.
And doesn't that mean they would actually be worse off?
Just wondering.
But from the look of it protectionism would protect robots more than workers, or workers only if they agreed to work for little or nothing more than the current going wage - or the price of a good robot.
So the goods the robots or workers got to produce in America, thanks to protectionism, would cost more for American consumers or businesses, but American workers would gain little or nothing by way of better wages.
And doesn't that mean they would actually be worse off?
Just wondering.
Thursday, August 25, 2016
"Our Revolution" in trouble
Almost everything they are for I oppose.
Almost everything they oppose I am for.
Strangely absent from their concerns, as listed in this story, is the issue of international trade.
Ah, well.
Fair trade is just free trade made even more profitable for the foreign producers who get our jobs, anyway.
Bernie and the left have always been faux opponents of free trade.
True, they seem to aim at better for retirees, but I doubt that can be trusted.
Far too many of the sorts of young and radical leftists who support Bernie make no effort to hide their anger at and scorn for old white folks.
And the agenda as a whole is too ambitious, largely wrong-headed, and puts at risk what we already have.
Sunday, August 21, 2016
Is abandoning neoliberalism the same thing as adopting protectionism?
I think not.
The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics
Globalist, cosmopolitan critics of neoliberalism may note and celebrate, but do not share the aims of, the essentially protectionist and nationalist populist movements opposing free trade and/or free immigration on economic grounds.
These populisms favor the interests of the working classes and poor native to the nations that lose by free trade or open low-wage immigration over those of the workers of foreign nations that gain.
That is, they favor the interests of better off workers and poor over those of worse off.
Fair trading politicians and cosmopolitan global leftists merely pretend to support those native interests, while protectionist politicians actually do.
The populist right has taken over these issues in Europe and America because they are about competition of nations for advantage, and the left in general has, compared to the right, abandoned the notion that the people of a nation have any legitimate moral or political claim to special solicitude from each other or from their own leaders and government, when their economic or power interests clash with those of foreigners.
More particularly, the left in Europe is also more committed to the EU and everywhere is more committed to the UN and other transnational sources of power and legitimacy than to the nations, even their own nations.
Again more particularly, the left in America disapproves US national power per se in any case, as well as using it exclusively or even primarily to further American interests, even if through peaceful avenues of trade and the like.
And the American left expects the votes of immigrants, and wants besides to use immigration to alter the balance of power among the races in America.
The right, on the other hand, pretty much everywhere is using these same issues as bait, to lure working class votes to help undermine progressive economic and social policies and programs of advantage to those working folk, themselves.
They aren't really going to go in for trade and immigration protection of domestic labor all that much, anyway.
This is true both in Europe and in America, of the anti-EU and anti-immigration, populist right of the Old World and the Trumpism of the New.
Trump might personally be sincere in his protectionism, but the party he leads is dead set against it.
The death of neoliberalism and the crisis in western politics
Globalist, cosmopolitan critics of neoliberalism may note and celebrate, but do not share the aims of, the essentially protectionist and nationalist populist movements opposing free trade and/or free immigration on economic grounds.
These populisms favor the interests of the working classes and poor native to the nations that lose by free trade or open low-wage immigration over those of the workers of foreign nations that gain.
That is, they favor the interests of better off workers and poor over those of worse off.
Fair trading politicians and cosmopolitan global leftists merely pretend to support those native interests, while protectionist politicians actually do.
The populist right has taken over these issues in Europe and America because they are about competition of nations for advantage, and the left in general has, compared to the right, abandoned the notion that the people of a nation have any legitimate moral or political claim to special solicitude from each other or from their own leaders and government, when their economic or power interests clash with those of foreigners.
More particularly, the left in Europe is also more committed to the EU and everywhere is more committed to the UN and other transnational sources of power and legitimacy than to the nations, even their own nations.
Again more particularly, the left in America disapproves US national power per se in any case, as well as using it exclusively or even primarily to further American interests, even if through peaceful avenues of trade and the like.
And the American left expects the votes of immigrants, and wants besides to use immigration to alter the balance of power among the races in America.
The right, on the other hand, pretty much everywhere is using these same issues as bait, to lure working class votes to help undermine progressive economic and social policies and programs of advantage to those working folk, themselves.
They aren't really going to go in for trade and immigration protection of domestic labor all that much, anyway.
This is true both in Europe and in America, of the anti-EU and anti-immigration, populist right of the Old World and the Trumpism of the New.
Trump might personally be sincere in his protectionism, but the party he leads is dead set against it.
Monday, July 4, 2016
O against protectionism
Obama: We Will Shape An International Order That Works For Our People
Not even trying to sound like Bernie, much less Trump.
President Obama touted the benefits of globalism in a joint press conference Wednesday with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Obama said "protectionism or anti-trade arguments" are prescriptions that will not work and promised the "international order" will help those who have been neglected by free trade.
The president holds the TPP deal will increase American exports and bolster fair trade controls on our trading partners.
Already a devotee of the fair trade restrictions Bernie calls for, he has not like Hillary adopted the merely rhetorical economic nationalism of Bernie Sanders, much less the real thing comprising high tariffs, import quotas, and bans urged by Donald Trump.
Not even trying to sound like Bernie, much less Trump.
President Obama touted the benefits of globalism in a joint press conference Wednesday with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Obama said "protectionism or anti-trade arguments" are prescriptions that will not work and promised the "international order" will help those who have been neglected by free trade.
The president holds the TPP deal will increase American exports and bolster fair trade controls on our trading partners.
Already a devotee of the fair trade restrictions Bernie calls for, he has not like Hillary adopted the merely rhetorical economic nationalism of Bernie Sanders, much less the real thing comprising high tariffs, import quotas, and bans urged by Donald Trump.
Thursday, June 30, 2016
The Guardian fact checks Trump
Fact-check: Donald Trump on trade, globalization and the Clintons
The topic is Il Duce's comments in Monessen the other day.
They admit he was mostly right, in particular concerning the adverse effect freer trade has had on the American working class.
Democrats including Hillary really don't plan to do much about it.
And the fair trade rules Bernie calls for would protect foreign workers who make what we import, not the jobs of American workers.
They mean the foreigners who get jobs in the factories that replace American factories are protected against the worst forms of exploitation.
They do nothing to seriously slow the exportation of jobs free trade has entailed, let alone stop it, and the notion fair trade rules can reverse job exportation is an utter fantasy.
Nobody but Trump is proposing use of the only tools that could stop or reverse the flow of manufacturing jobs out of the US, tariffs and even selective import quotas and prohibitions.
Nobody.
This is one of those issues both major parties have simply refused to address for decades, watching with folded arms as the American working class got hammered.
And that is one of the reasons Trump has been able to so successfully challenge everyone else.
Just as the refusal of the European classe politique to give an inch on concerns about Islam and immigration has empowered the opposition to the very existence of the EU, so the refusal of the American classe politique to lift a finger to protect American labor from globalization has empowered Trump's rebellion.
And the irony is it is far from clear he would really even try to use such tools.
It is highly unlikely the congress would go along with him, anyway.
Opponents of his plan to raise tariffs point to the dangers of trade war and the harm done by raising tariffs in 1930.
Defenders point out we have for decades been running huge trade deficits anyway with the very countries from which our markets need protection, so our economy would suffer less harm from lost exports to them than it would gain by protection from imports from them.
Economists more and more seem to be admitting the protectionists have the better case.
So it seems, anyway.
The topic is Il Duce's comments in Monessen the other day.
They admit he was mostly right, in particular concerning the adverse effect freer trade has had on the American working class.
Democrats including Hillary really don't plan to do much about it.
And the fair trade rules Bernie calls for would protect foreign workers who make what we import, not the jobs of American workers.
They mean the foreigners who get jobs in the factories that replace American factories are protected against the worst forms of exploitation.
They do nothing to seriously slow the exportation of jobs free trade has entailed, let alone stop it, and the notion fair trade rules can reverse job exportation is an utter fantasy.
Nobody but Trump is proposing use of the only tools that could stop or reverse the flow of manufacturing jobs out of the US, tariffs and even selective import quotas and prohibitions.
Nobody.
This is one of those issues both major parties have simply refused to address for decades, watching with folded arms as the American working class got hammered.
And that is one of the reasons Trump has been able to so successfully challenge everyone else.
Just as the refusal of the European classe politique to give an inch on concerns about Islam and immigration has empowered the opposition to the very existence of the EU, so the refusal of the American classe politique to lift a finger to protect American labor from globalization has empowered Trump's rebellion.
And the irony is it is far from clear he would really even try to use such tools.
It is highly unlikely the congress would go along with him, anyway.
Opponents of his plan to raise tariffs point to the dangers of trade war and the harm done by raising tariffs in 1930.
Defenders point out we have for decades been running huge trade deficits anyway with the very countries from which our markets need protection, so our economy would suffer less harm from lost exports to them than it would gain by protection from imports from them.
Economists more and more seem to be admitting the protectionists have the better case.
So it seems, anyway.
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
Bernie shifts to global economic revolution
Bernie Sanders: Democrats Need to Wake Up
This is not Bernie using his hard won high profile to shift from seeking the Democratic nomination to supporting Hillary and the Democratic Party against Trump and the Republican Party.
This is Bernie the Seattle rioter, the global anti-capitalist revolutionary jumping up and down and angrily shouting in rage.
Rage at a human race born in naked poverty, a humanity that spent most of history as poor as the most desperate Chinese peasant of the 19th Century, a human world in which wealth remains exceptional and the erratic race between progress and poverty sees now one and now the other dash ahead.
Rage at the global poverty against which progress still races, and at the inequality that is in any case intrinsic to capitalism.
Rage at the global capitalism, itself, that Obama and Hillary support, endorse, and seek to ameliorate.
We so are not all socialists, now.
And then he pivots to briefly damning those who supported Brexit and those who support Trump while espousing the left wing fake version of economic nationalism, before with his usual hypocrisy pretending to take their side and share their rage, as he has done throughout his campaign.
We need to fundamentally reject our “free trade” policies and move to fair trade.
"Fair trade" is what cosmopolitans urge to steal votes from economic nationalists who urge tariffs or even bans on importing specified products.
It does not and cannot keep jobs in America and is not intended to, but only ensures that the foreigners who get our jobs are not too awfully exploited.
It is what Denis Kucinich and David Sirota used to talk about while pretending they wanted to stop factories moving to Mexico or China when what they really wanted to do was make those lost American jobs even more beneficial to the Mexican and Chinese workers who took them.
Americans should not have to compete against workers in low-wage countries who earn pennies an hour.
Absolutely not.
We need to insure those workers in low wage countries at least earn dimes and quarters.
That is what "fair trade" is all about.
We must defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
And then he ends pretending, as he has all along, that he wants to prioritize Americans while demanding policies that would harm Americans for the purpose of benefiting others around the world, as well as future owners of beach-front and shore level property.
We must help poor countries develop sustainable economic models.
. . . .
We need to create tens of millions of jobs worldwide by combating global climate change and by transforming the world’s energy system away from fossil fuels.
We need international efforts to cut military spending around the globe and address the causes of war: poverty, hatred, hopelessness and ignorance.
Those are the causes of war, huh?
My God, what awful left-wing twaddle.
The notion that Donald Trump could benefit from the same forces that gave the Leave proponents a majority in Britain should sound an alarm for the Democratic Party in the United States.
Millions of American voters, like the Leave supporters, are understandably angry and frustrated by the economic forces that are destroying the middle class.
In this pivotal moment, the Democratic Party and a new Democratic president need to make clear that we stand with those who are struggling and who have been left behind.
We must create national and global economies that work for all, not just a handful of billionaires.
So writes the global radical who has all along worn the sheep's clothing of faux economic nationalism, his crude redistributionism amiably attired as Scandinavian social democracy.
There is a lot more Chavez/Madero/Pope Francis in this fellow than he has clearly let on.
Had he been chosen as the Democrats' nominee Trump and the Republicans would have eaten him alive.
PS.
Yes, all this means that the establishment left and the establishment right actually agree that Americans are overpaid.
Raising the minimum wage in a context of free trade will not actually help American workers that much as it will mostly just drive factories out of America even faster, possibly at the cost of a rise in inflation putting a nasty ding in people's - and especially retirees - nesteggs.
But that will help make the globalizing plutes even richer (conservatives: Yay!) while pleasing cosmopolitan liberals and libertarians who think giving poor foreigners our jobs benefits the globally worst off, does the greatest good for the greatest number, and helps equalize the global playing field.
Ditto open borders and high-volume low-wage immigration.
In contrast to all of which Donald Trump, alone, stands for positions on trade and immigration that put America First.
This is not Bernie using his hard won high profile to shift from seeking the Democratic nomination to supporting Hillary and the Democratic Party against Trump and the Republican Party.
This is Bernie the Seattle rioter, the global anti-capitalist revolutionary jumping up and down and angrily shouting in rage.
Rage at a human race born in naked poverty, a humanity that spent most of history as poor as the most desperate Chinese peasant of the 19th Century, a human world in which wealth remains exceptional and the erratic race between progress and poverty sees now one and now the other dash ahead.
Rage at the global poverty against which progress still races, and at the inequality that is in any case intrinsic to capitalism.
Rage at the global capitalism, itself, that Obama and Hillary support, endorse, and seek to ameliorate.
We so are not all socialists, now.
And then he pivots to briefly damning those who supported Brexit and those who support Trump while espousing the left wing fake version of economic nationalism, before with his usual hypocrisy pretending to take their side and share their rage, as he has done throughout his campaign.
We need to fundamentally reject our “free trade” policies and move to fair trade.
"Fair trade" is what cosmopolitans urge to steal votes from economic nationalists who urge tariffs or even bans on importing specified products.
It does not and cannot keep jobs in America and is not intended to, but only ensures that the foreigners who get our jobs are not too awfully exploited.
It is what Denis Kucinich and David Sirota used to talk about while pretending they wanted to stop factories moving to Mexico or China when what they really wanted to do was make those lost American jobs even more beneficial to the Mexican and Chinese workers who took them.
Americans should not have to compete against workers in low-wage countries who earn pennies an hour.
Absolutely not.
We need to insure those workers in low wage countries at least earn dimes and quarters.
That is what "fair trade" is all about.
We must defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
And then he ends pretending, as he has all along, that he wants to prioritize Americans while demanding policies that would harm Americans for the purpose of benefiting others around the world, as well as future owners of beach-front and shore level property.
We must help poor countries develop sustainable economic models.
. . . .
We need to create tens of millions of jobs worldwide by combating global climate change and by transforming the world’s energy system away from fossil fuels.
We need international efforts to cut military spending around the globe and address the causes of war: poverty, hatred, hopelessness and ignorance.
Those are the causes of war, huh?
My God, what awful left-wing twaddle.
The notion that Donald Trump could benefit from the same forces that gave the Leave proponents a majority in Britain should sound an alarm for the Democratic Party in the United States.
Millions of American voters, like the Leave supporters, are understandably angry and frustrated by the economic forces that are destroying the middle class.
In this pivotal moment, the Democratic Party and a new Democratic president need to make clear that we stand with those who are struggling and who have been left behind.
We must create national and global economies that work for all, not just a handful of billionaires.
So writes the global radical who has all along worn the sheep's clothing of faux economic nationalism, his crude redistributionism amiably attired as Scandinavian social democracy.
There is a lot more Chavez/Madero/Pope Francis in this fellow than he has clearly let on.
Had he been chosen as the Democrats' nominee Trump and the Republicans would have eaten him alive.
PS.
Yes, all this means that the establishment left and the establishment right actually agree that Americans are overpaid.
Raising the minimum wage in a context of free trade will not actually help American workers that much as it will mostly just drive factories out of America even faster, possibly at the cost of a rise in inflation putting a nasty ding in people's - and especially retirees - nesteggs.
But that will help make the globalizing plutes even richer (conservatives: Yay!) while pleasing cosmopolitan liberals and libertarians who think giving poor foreigners our jobs benefits the globally worst off, does the greatest good for the greatest number, and helps equalize the global playing field.
Ditto open borders and high-volume low-wage immigration.
In contrast to all of which Donald Trump, alone, stands for positions on trade and immigration that put America First.
Friday, May 13, 2016
This is how splitters see things
Ron Chusid, Sanders supporter, on Hillary vs. Trump
While I will not entirely give up hope of an upset in the Democratic race by Bernie Sanders, the media is getting set for the showdown between Dangerous Donald and Crooked Hillary.
Those are the current nicknames each has chosen for other, and they are both right about the other.
I had planned to call them greater evil and lesser evil, but found that too many readers disagree as to which is which, even if we agree both of them are too evil to be fit to be president, or hold any other elective office.
Nobody has ever ever made any decent case for any actual quid pro quo corruption in Hillary's past or present.
Il Duce is only echoing decades of unsubstantiated Republican slander and character assassination and the rhetoric of that unreconstructed sixties jerk, Bernie Sanders, who thinks she and the Democratic Party are corrupt because they are frankly and seriously pro-capitalism and take money from capitalists.
Bernie and those like him think the entire system is corrupt because it is capitalist, it is pro-capitalist, and it runs on contributed money mostly from interested parties who are not poor, black, or powerless.
Dangerous Donald is trying hard to win over the Republicans.
He already has the racist and xenophobic base of GOP voters, but reaction to him is mixed among the more ideological GOP leaders (who never figured out that the base doesn’t really care about their economic theories).
Trump is backing away from one of his more dangerous and controversial ideas.
He now says that banning Muslims from entering the country was “only a suggestion.”
I have commented much elsewhere on the viciousness of the left's unremitting accusations of racism against powerless white people seeking to defend themselves - think of the constant charges of classic European anti-Semitism that Jews plot unrelentingly against Christians and even use the blood of murdered Christian children in secret rites - and will not do so here again.
But Trump is a man who has urged the deportation of eleven million people, the unilateral repudiation of existing trade agreements and erection of massive protective tariffs, the routine use of torture against terrorists and Jihaders and the murder of their families, the breakup of the EU, fair play for Putin in Ukraine and Syria, US withdrawal from NATO and our Pacific alliances, abandonment of non-proliferation, and the possession of nukes by Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia.
And Chusid, passing over all this, classes his proposed temporary ban on Muslims entering the US among his more dangerous ideas.
And then he goes on with the Naderite, Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, one's as bad as the other line.
Clinton has also faced difficulties policy-wise too this week, with Huffington Post and Common Dreams chastising Clinton for refusing to Rule Out Any and All Benefit Cuts to Social Security.
On the other side, I’m sure there are a lot of Republicans who are angry with Dangerous Donald for not promising to cut Social Security.
But follow the link and read the page.
It's pure anti-Hillary spin.
While I will not entirely give up hope of an upset in the Democratic race by Bernie Sanders, the media is getting set for the showdown between Dangerous Donald and Crooked Hillary.
Those are the current nicknames each has chosen for other, and they are both right about the other.
I had planned to call them greater evil and lesser evil, but found that too many readers disagree as to which is which, even if we agree both of them are too evil to be fit to be president, or hold any other elective office.
Nobody has ever ever made any decent case for any actual quid pro quo corruption in Hillary's past or present.
Il Duce is only echoing decades of unsubstantiated Republican slander and character assassination and the rhetoric of that unreconstructed sixties jerk, Bernie Sanders, who thinks she and the Democratic Party are corrupt because they are frankly and seriously pro-capitalism and take money from capitalists.
Bernie and those like him think the entire system is corrupt because it is capitalist, it is pro-capitalist, and it runs on contributed money mostly from interested parties who are not poor, black, or powerless.
Dangerous Donald is trying hard to win over the Republicans.
He already has the racist and xenophobic base of GOP voters, but reaction to him is mixed among the more ideological GOP leaders (who never figured out that the base doesn’t really care about their economic theories).
Trump is backing away from one of his more dangerous and controversial ideas.
He now says that banning Muslims from entering the country was “only a suggestion.”
I have commented much elsewhere on the viciousness of the left's unremitting accusations of racism against powerless white people seeking to defend themselves - think of the constant charges of classic European anti-Semitism that Jews plot unrelentingly against Christians and even use the blood of murdered Christian children in secret rites - and will not do so here again.
But Trump is a man who has urged the deportation of eleven million people, the unilateral repudiation of existing trade agreements and erection of massive protective tariffs, the routine use of torture against terrorists and Jihaders and the murder of their families, the breakup of the EU, fair play for Putin in Ukraine and Syria, US withdrawal from NATO and our Pacific alliances, abandonment of non-proliferation, and the possession of nukes by Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia.
And Chusid, passing over all this, classes his proposed temporary ban on Muslims entering the US among his more dangerous ideas.
And then he goes on with the Naderite, Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, one's as bad as the other line.
Clinton has also faced difficulties policy-wise too this week, with Huffington Post and Common Dreams chastising Clinton for refusing to Rule Out Any and All Benefit Cuts to Social Security.
On the other side, I’m sure there are a lot of Republicans who are angry with Dangerous Donald for not promising to cut Social Security.
But follow the link and read the page.
It's pure anti-Hillary spin.
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
Yesterday's results
Results
Hillary beat Bernie everywhere, though in some places it was close.
Kasich won Ohio and Trump won everywhere else, including Illinois (remember Chicago last Friday?), though in some places it was close, and Cruz ran strong right behind him.
Rubio is out.
What happened to all those protectionist voters in Ohio who were supposed to go for Trump or Bernie?
Hillary Clinton and John Kasich Win Ohio, and So Does Free Trade
Michigan last week voted for reality-show billionaire Donald Trump and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the most aggressive trade foes in the field.
But in Ohio, Hillary Clinton and home-state Gov. John Kasich prevailed.
Clinton has moved to close the distance with Sanders on trade, talking up her opposition to the TPP and the folly of past deals, like NAFTA.
But she’s undoubtedly more of an internationalist than her rival to the left, having helped initiate the TPP negotiations when she served as President Obama’s Secretary of State.
And Kasich has been an even more unabashed trade supporter, continuing to embrace the TPP, though he’s sprinkled his rhetoric on the stump with calls for “fair trade,” in a nod to the newly protectionist energy among Republican voters.
Trump, on the other hand, has savaged the TPP as “insanity” and a “disaster,” and maligned Kasich for his support of it.
Hillary beat Bernie by 13 points and Kasich beat Trump by 11 points.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton was the big winner Tuesday night.
She had strong victories in Florida and North Carolina and won her native state of Illinois.
But Ohio was a particularly welcome win, coming just a week after Bernie Sanders scored an upset with Rust Belt voters in Michigan.
The message that the Sanders campaign tried to send was that Clinton was a "regional candidate" who could only win states with large percentages of black and brown voters.
Sanders, the argument went, was the only candidate who could better appeal to white, working-class Democrats who felt shafted by NAFTA and other trade deals.
Clinton, whether because she has actually moved toward more populist economic policies or simply has done a better job at dressing up her centrist pragmatism -- appears to have burst Sanders' bubble.
Hillary Clinton can now only be said to be a "regional candidate" insofar as the entirety of the United States constitutes a region.
And mostly now she's running against Trump.
This from last night.
She hammered Trump repeatedly during her speech in West Palm Beach, Florida, only a few minutes from Trump's resort there, saying at one point: "When we hear a candidate for president call for rounding up 12 million immigrants, banning Muslims from entering the United States, when he embraces torture, that doesn't make him strong, it makes him wrong."
If Trump's a fascist he's a damned thin-skinned and sulky one.
Last night.
This was a defiant candidate.
The violence that erupted at his rally in Chicago last weekend didn't stop him from winning the state.
The media criticism led him only to take a whack at "disgusting reporters" and leave without taking a single question, even though his campaign had advertised his election-night event as a "press conference."
CNN thinks it's unlikely Trump can win a majority of delegates before the convention, where Cruz but also Kasich could hold large blocks.
Hillary beat Bernie everywhere, though in some places it was close.
Kasich won Ohio and Trump won everywhere else, including Illinois (remember Chicago last Friday?), though in some places it was close, and Cruz ran strong right behind him.
Rubio is out.
What happened to all those protectionist voters in Ohio who were supposed to go for Trump or Bernie?
Hillary Clinton and John Kasich Win Ohio, and So Does Free Trade
Michigan last week voted for reality-show billionaire Donald Trump and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the most aggressive trade foes in the field.
But in Ohio, Hillary Clinton and home-state Gov. John Kasich prevailed.
Clinton has moved to close the distance with Sanders on trade, talking up her opposition to the TPP and the folly of past deals, like NAFTA.
But she’s undoubtedly more of an internationalist than her rival to the left, having helped initiate the TPP negotiations when she served as President Obama’s Secretary of State.
And Kasich has been an even more unabashed trade supporter, continuing to embrace the TPP, though he’s sprinkled his rhetoric on the stump with calls for “fair trade,” in a nod to the newly protectionist energy among Republican voters.
Trump, on the other hand, has savaged the TPP as “insanity” and a “disaster,” and maligned Kasich for his support of it.
Hillary beat Bernie by 13 points and Kasich beat Trump by 11 points.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton was the big winner Tuesday night.
She had strong victories in Florida and North Carolina and won her native state of Illinois.
But Ohio was a particularly welcome win, coming just a week after Bernie Sanders scored an upset with Rust Belt voters in Michigan.
The message that the Sanders campaign tried to send was that Clinton was a "regional candidate" who could only win states with large percentages of black and brown voters.
Sanders, the argument went, was the only candidate who could better appeal to white, working-class Democrats who felt shafted by NAFTA and other trade deals.
Clinton, whether because she has actually moved toward more populist economic policies or simply has done a better job at dressing up her centrist pragmatism -- appears to have burst Sanders' bubble.
Hillary Clinton can now only be said to be a "regional candidate" insofar as the entirety of the United States constitutes a region.
And mostly now she's running against Trump.
This from last night.
She hammered Trump repeatedly during her speech in West Palm Beach, Florida, only a few minutes from Trump's resort there, saying at one point: "When we hear a candidate for president call for rounding up 12 million immigrants, banning Muslims from entering the United States, when he embraces torture, that doesn't make him strong, it makes him wrong."
If Trump's a fascist he's a damned thin-skinned and sulky one.
Last night.
This was a defiant candidate.
The violence that erupted at his rally in Chicago last weekend didn't stop him from winning the state.
The media criticism led him only to take a whack at "disgusting reporters" and leave without taking a single question, even though his campaign had advertised his election-night event as a "press conference."
CNN thinks it's unlikely Trump can win a majority of delegates before the convention, where Cruz but also Kasich could hold large blocks.
Friday, October 16, 2015
Trump for real. And Hillary. And Bernie.
Heard on Morning Joe, today, while driving to the mall for my walk.
Per Joe and Mika, establishment Republicans and pundits, much though they hate it, are admitting Trump might actually be their party's nominee, when the dust settles.
He is far more Main Street than Wall Street, being opposed to immigration and free trade while refusing to try to eliminate Social Security and Medicare.
Each of these is directly opposed to the Wall Street view.
In the money primaries, Jeb W, Cruz, and Rubio are way behind Trump and Carson.
In the polls, Trump leads and Carson isn't far behind, while all the "respectable" candidates are in single digits.
Carly Fiorina gets a bounce with every debate and then falls back, again.
Eugene Robinson, writing about the Democrats' debate.
The main event was Clinton versus Sanders, and what should worry Republicans is that the two leading Democrats spent so much of the evening on the issues Americans say they care about.
To cite one representative survey, a recent CBS poll asked registered voters what they most wanted to hear the candidates discuss.
"Economy and jobs" came in first at 24 percent, while "immigration" was a distant second at 11 percent and "foreign policy" third at 10 percent.
But what do Republicans talk about in their debates?
Who is going to be toughest on illegal immigration, who is more opposed to President Obama's foreign policy, who is more determined to defund Planned Parenthood.
On the economy, they fight to establish who is more opposed to raising the minimum wage.
The GOP establishment candidates have no economic message to offer beyond the party's standard prescription of tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation for businesses.
That may be why the front-runners are Trump and Carson, who have never held public office and whose economic prescriptions are more populist.
It is a pressing fact of daily life for most Americans that middle-class incomes have fallen in the past decade and are roughly the same as they were 20 years ago.
This explains why Gallup found recently that despite the economic recovery, only about half of Americans are "feeling better" about their financial situations.
How can government help the middle class?
With a higher minimum wage?
With a mandate for businesses to offer paid family leave?
With assistance in paying for higher education, perhaps even free tuition at public universities?
With trade and tax policies that encourage keeping jobs in the United States?
The Democratic candidates understand that these are the issues people care most about.
Trump gets it, too, in his own bombastic way.
A party that goes into the election without a compelling message on jobs and incomes -- I'm talking to you, GOP establishment -- is begging to lose.
And then there is Krauthammer.
Unless she’s indicted, Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination.
. . . . .
Amid the playacting between today and Clinton’s coronation next summer, we can joyfully savor the most delightful moment of the debate, when we were reminded by Anderson Cooper that Sanders had honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
Really?
Well, yes, supposing a working honeymoon is still a honeymoon.
And if it was red-baiting, as Bernie's fans on the left are insisting, to allude to this it was only red-baiting of a venial sort.
First, because Cooper did not actually denounce him but only alluded to his working honeymoon.
And second because, if you surf the net for it you will find that while some people and some dictionaries define "red-baiting" as (1) denouncing someone as a communist, anarchist, radical, socialist, or what have you others define it as (2) falsely denouncing someone as a communist, anarchist, radical, socialist, or what have you.
Now, the truth is that Bernie deserved to be red-baited in sense (1), given his unrenounced past and flaunted present.
Thus red-baiting someone who was for decades an apologist and fan of red revolutions and even now daily and unreservedly denounces capitalism, calls vociferously for a "political revolution," and insists he is a socialist is hardly unfair.
In any case, it is clear one could not denounce him any more falsely than he has, himself, as a communist, anarchist, radical, socialist, or what have you.
In a nutshell:
Calling Bernie a socialist is only red-baiting in sense (1), which is to say, it is telling the truth.
Calling Hillary a socialist, as some lying right wingers have done, is red-baiting in sense (2).
Per Joe and Mika, establishment Republicans and pundits, much though they hate it, are admitting Trump might actually be their party's nominee, when the dust settles.
He is far more Main Street than Wall Street, being opposed to immigration and free trade while refusing to try to eliminate Social Security and Medicare.
Each of these is directly opposed to the Wall Street view.
In the money primaries, Jeb W, Cruz, and Rubio are way behind Trump and Carson.
In the polls, Trump leads and Carson isn't far behind, while all the "respectable" candidates are in single digits.
Carly Fiorina gets a bounce with every debate and then falls back, again.
Eugene Robinson, writing about the Democrats' debate.
The main event was Clinton versus Sanders, and what should worry Republicans is that the two leading Democrats spent so much of the evening on the issues Americans say they care about.
To cite one representative survey, a recent CBS poll asked registered voters what they most wanted to hear the candidates discuss.
"Economy and jobs" came in first at 24 percent, while "immigration" was a distant second at 11 percent and "foreign policy" third at 10 percent.
But what do Republicans talk about in their debates?
Who is going to be toughest on illegal immigration, who is more opposed to President Obama's foreign policy, who is more determined to defund Planned Parenthood.
On the economy, they fight to establish who is more opposed to raising the minimum wage.
The GOP establishment candidates have no economic message to offer beyond the party's standard prescription of tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation for businesses.
That may be why the front-runners are Trump and Carson, who have never held public office and whose economic prescriptions are more populist.
It is a pressing fact of daily life for most Americans that middle-class incomes have fallen in the past decade and are roughly the same as they were 20 years ago.
This explains why Gallup found recently that despite the economic recovery, only about half of Americans are "feeling better" about their financial situations.
How can government help the middle class?
With a higher minimum wage?
With a mandate for businesses to offer paid family leave?
With assistance in paying for higher education, perhaps even free tuition at public universities?
With trade and tax policies that encourage keeping jobs in the United States?
The Democratic candidates understand that these are the issues people care most about.
Trump gets it, too, in his own bombastic way.
A party that goes into the election without a compelling message on jobs and incomes -- I'm talking to you, GOP establishment -- is begging to lose.
And then there is Krauthammer.
Unless she’s indicted, Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination.
. . . . .
Amid the playacting between today and Clinton’s coronation next summer, we can joyfully savor the most delightful moment of the debate, when we were reminded by Anderson Cooper that Sanders had honeymooned in the Soviet Union.
Really?
Well, yes, supposing a working honeymoon is still a honeymoon.
And if it was red-baiting, as Bernie's fans on the left are insisting, to allude to this it was only red-baiting of a venial sort.
First, because Cooper did not actually denounce him but only alluded to his working honeymoon.
And second because, if you surf the net for it you will find that while some people and some dictionaries define "red-baiting" as (1) denouncing someone as a communist, anarchist, radical, socialist, or what have you others define it as (2) falsely denouncing someone as a communist, anarchist, radical, socialist, or what have you.
Now, the truth is that Bernie deserved to be red-baited in sense (1), given his unrenounced past and flaunted present.
Thus red-baiting someone who was for decades an apologist and fan of red revolutions and even now daily and unreservedly denounces capitalism, calls vociferously for a "political revolution," and insists he is a socialist is hardly unfair.
In any case, it is clear one could not denounce him any more falsely than he has, himself, as a communist, anarchist, radical, socialist, or what have you.
In a nutshell:
Calling Bernie a socialist is only red-baiting in sense (1), which is to say, it is telling the truth.
Calling Hillary a socialist, as some lying right wingers have done, is red-baiting in sense (2).
Monday, September 7, 2015
How does Trump win the White House?
The Democrats let their left paint them as the party of post-nationalism, cosmopolitanism, open borders, illegal immigration, crime, black radicalism, and hatred for whites, Christians, and anybody who isn't a sexual outlaw.
The Black Panthers
Crime Is Back
Polls are already showing that Clinton is barely getting little more than one-third of the white vote.
War On Police Sparks National Crime Wave
Barack Obama and the War on Cops
This year, 24 cops have been gunned down.
And the day after deputy Goforth’s execution, “Black Lives Matter!” showed up at the Minnesota state fair chanting, “Pigs in a blanket! Fry ’em like bacon!”
Last fall, when mobs blocked highways after the death of Eric Garner in an encounter with police on Staten Island, the hoodlum chant was: “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want ’em? Now!”
Soon after, two cops in Brooklyn were executed in their patrol car.
Time for Obama to ascend the bully pulpit and call out the racial demagogues in the fever swamps of his own radical left constituency.
For some of the evils of the last century we thought we left behind seem to be returning, as is the old indulgence of lawlessness when done by those claiming some “grievance” against society.
Violent crime is rising again, a direct result, many believe, of a new police reluctance to be aggressive in enforcing the law, to avoid violent clashes with criminals and suspects, the so-called “Ferguson effect.”
The lead story in the Sept. 1 New York Times reported a surge in murders in the city after the Eric Garner incident, and even greater surges in Milwaukee, St. Louis, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
. . . .
In the 1960s, Vice President Hubert Humphrey declared that if he had to endure the conditions of the ghetto, he “could lead a pretty good riot” himself, while Nixon ridiculed the Kerner Commission report that blamed the riots on “white racism.”
Nixon and George Wallace got 57 percent of the vote in 1968.
And a strong stand for law and order helped to give the GOP a near quarter-century lock on the presidency.
The law and order issue is lying there again, waiting to be picked up.
Meanwhile we ought to hear from our president about who and what he thinks is responsible for all those wounded and dead cops.
Meanwhile, Trump keeps on ignoring the agenda of Wall Street - open borders, free trade, low wages, repeal of a century of Progressivism - in favor of nationalism and takes the Republican nomination away from the conservatives and the GOP establishment.
And then, remember how Nixon won in 1968 mostly because the Democrats threw the election away.
And then they did it again, only more so, in 1972.
The Black Panthers
Crime Is Back
Polls are already showing that Clinton is barely getting little more than one-third of the white vote.
War On Police Sparks National Crime Wave
Barack Obama and the War on Cops
This year, 24 cops have been gunned down.
And the day after deputy Goforth’s execution, “Black Lives Matter!” showed up at the Minnesota state fair chanting, “Pigs in a blanket! Fry ’em like bacon!”
Last fall, when mobs blocked highways after the death of Eric Garner in an encounter with police on Staten Island, the hoodlum chant was: “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want ’em? Now!”
Soon after, two cops in Brooklyn were executed in their patrol car.
Time for Obama to ascend the bully pulpit and call out the racial demagogues in the fever swamps of his own radical left constituency.
For some of the evils of the last century we thought we left behind seem to be returning, as is the old indulgence of lawlessness when done by those claiming some “grievance” against society.
Violent crime is rising again, a direct result, many believe, of a new police reluctance to be aggressive in enforcing the law, to avoid violent clashes with criminals and suspects, the so-called “Ferguson effect.”
The lead story in the Sept. 1 New York Times reported a surge in murders in the city after the Eric Garner incident, and even greater surges in Milwaukee, St. Louis, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
. . . .
In the 1960s, Vice President Hubert Humphrey declared that if he had to endure the conditions of the ghetto, he “could lead a pretty good riot” himself, while Nixon ridiculed the Kerner Commission report that blamed the riots on “white racism.”
Nixon and George Wallace got 57 percent of the vote in 1968.
And a strong stand for law and order helped to give the GOP a near quarter-century lock on the presidency.
The law and order issue is lying there again, waiting to be picked up.
Meanwhile we ought to hear from our president about who and what he thinks is responsible for all those wounded and dead cops.
Meanwhile, Trump keeps on ignoring the agenda of Wall Street - open borders, free trade, low wages, repeal of a century of Progressivism - in favor of nationalism and takes the Republican nomination away from the conservatives and the GOP establishment.
And then, remember how Nixon won in 1968 mostly because the Democrats threw the election away.
And then they did it again, only more so, in 1972.
Saturday, August 29, 2015
Maher, of all people, should know better
Bill Maher Smacks Media For Uncritical Coverage Of Trump's Racism
Maher has spent decades fending off accusations that his suspicions and criticisms of Islam are racist, but Karoli quotes him thus.
Note that Maher as quoted does not flatly accuse Trump of racism, despite Karoli's take.
Trump straight-up rants about how non-white foreigners are ruining the country.
From claiming unauthorized Mexican immigrants are drug dealers and "rapists," to saying he wants to deport 11 million people, to arguing that China is "killing us" on trade, Trump's political message is uncut xenophobia if not outright racism[.]
. . . .
With the exception of Bernie Sanders, Trump is now drawing bigger crowds than any other candidate.
That mass basis is a key foundation of fascism — without the delirious crowds, the fascist demagogue is little more than a deranged street preacher.
Many of those supporters are out-and-proud white nationalists, as documented in a fascinating "New Yorker" investigation.
Trump, far from a fascist by any stretch, while something of an economic nationalist (see his criticisms of the adverse impact on the US of free trade and too much low wage immigration, most of it illegal), has rejected the idea of American ethnic nationalism.
If Bernie's enthusiasts include radical socialists and even communists or communist sympathizers does that make Bernie personally either?
His enemies will say so.
What will Karoli (or Bill Maher) say to that?
Evan Osnos's story in The New Yorker is a silly hatchet-job, by the way.
Here's a snip.
In partisan terms, his ideas are riven by contradiction—he calls for mass deportations but opposes cuts to Medicare and Social Security; he vows to expand the military but criticizes free trade—and yet that is a reflection of voters’ often incoherent sets of convictions.
That was a contradiction?
Those are incoherent?
True, his agenda is not in line with the official view of either party, supposing Hollywood liberals speak for Democrats and Wall Street conservatives speak for Republicans.
But that just validates his supporters' - mostly white working and middle class, at a guess - political alienation, cited rather dismissively by Osnos.
Both Hollywood and Wall Street support big scale, low wage immigration and free trade, fair trade being just free trade, anyway, with riders to protect the foreign workers who get jobs producing for the American market.
Trump speaks to the concerns and insecurities of not just Republican but American Main Street by supporting both economic nationalism in defense of their jobs and those other key resources of ordinary Americans, Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid.
Nowadays, many on the left have admitted - Bernie Sanders, for example - that decades of free trade have done billionaires and foreign workers good at the expense of the ordinary working people of America.
And some - Bernie Sanders again, for example - have dared to admit the obvious, that flooding the market with low wage workers, illegal or not, has done its part to hold down wages over that same period while the plutocracy has scooped up the gains of American economic expansion.
And while Osnos, Maher, and Karoli call Trump a racist for these views, open borders, Wall Street conservatives have done the same both to Trump and to Sanders.
Maher has spent decades fending off accusations that his suspicions and criticisms of Islam are racist, but Karoli quotes him thus.
Note that Maher as quoted does not flatly accuse Trump of racism, despite Karoli's take.
Trump straight-up rants about how non-white foreigners are ruining the country.
From claiming unauthorized Mexican immigrants are drug dealers and "rapists," to saying he wants to deport 11 million people, to arguing that China is "killing us" on trade, Trump's political message is uncut xenophobia if not outright racism[.]
. . . .
With the exception of Bernie Sanders, Trump is now drawing bigger crowds than any other candidate.
That mass basis is a key foundation of fascism — without the delirious crowds, the fascist demagogue is little more than a deranged street preacher.
Many of those supporters are out-and-proud white nationalists, as documented in a fascinating "New Yorker" investigation.
Trump, far from a fascist by any stretch, while something of an economic nationalist (see his criticisms of the adverse impact on the US of free trade and too much low wage immigration, most of it illegal), has rejected the idea of American ethnic nationalism.
If Bernie's enthusiasts include radical socialists and even communists or communist sympathizers does that make Bernie personally either?
His enemies will say so.
What will Karoli (or Bill Maher) say to that?
Evan Osnos's story in The New Yorker is a silly hatchet-job, by the way.
Here's a snip.
In partisan terms, his ideas are riven by contradiction—he calls for mass deportations but opposes cuts to Medicare and Social Security; he vows to expand the military but criticizes free trade—and yet that is a reflection of voters’ often incoherent sets of convictions.
That was a contradiction?
Those are incoherent?
True, his agenda is not in line with the official view of either party, supposing Hollywood liberals speak for Democrats and Wall Street conservatives speak for Republicans.
But that just validates his supporters' - mostly white working and middle class, at a guess - political alienation, cited rather dismissively by Osnos.
Both Hollywood and Wall Street support big scale, low wage immigration and free trade, fair trade being just free trade, anyway, with riders to protect the foreign workers who get jobs producing for the American market.
Trump speaks to the concerns and insecurities of not just Republican but American Main Street by supporting both economic nationalism in defense of their jobs and those other key resources of ordinary Americans, Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid.
Nowadays, many on the left have admitted - Bernie Sanders, for example - that decades of free trade have done billionaires and foreign workers good at the expense of the ordinary working people of America.
And some - Bernie Sanders again, for example - have dared to admit the obvious, that flooding the market with low wage workers, illegal or not, has done its part to hold down wages over that same period while the plutocracy has scooped up the gains of American economic expansion.
And while Osnos, Maher, and Karoli call Trump a racist for these views, open borders, Wall Street conservatives have done the same both to Trump and to Sanders.
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Bernie is in
The Guardian
If he's still in when we get to the Pennsylvania primary I would vote for him over Hillary, for sure.
Need I point out that that does not mean I agree with his whole agenda?
But I agree with parts of it.
Bernie on Free Trade at The Guardian
Sanders sounds like a nationalist in the sense in which that word is opposed to "cosmopolitan."
Sooner or later, the left will take him to task about that, using cosmo moral arguments to defend the neoliberalism he opposes, hidden behind the tattered fig leaf of "fair trade."
If he's still in when we get to the Pennsylvania primary I would vote for him over Hillary, for sure.
Need I point out that that does not mean I agree with his whole agenda?
But I agree with parts of it.
Bernie on Free Trade at The Guardian
Sanders sounds like a nationalist in the sense in which that word is opposed to "cosmopolitan."
Sooner or later, the left will take him to task about that, using cosmo moral arguments to defend the neoliberalism he opposes, hidden behind the tattered fig leaf of "fair trade."
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
No, it's pretty much their own fault
Phooey.
The party's agenda, its propaganda, and its outlook are increasingly captive to people who have little loyalty to and don't much like the white working class that was the corner-stone of the New Deal coalition.
In fact, the Democrats generally make no bones about it and not only tolerate but encourage hatred of those same whites.
The trade deal with China, the eco-deal with China, the rejection of the Canada pipeline, the big effort to legalize millions of illegals and open up the country to more low wage immigration, and repeated "rush to judgment" White House and Democrat support for racist attacks on whites falsely accused of racist crimes all are among only the latest moves to put the party in direct opposition to its New Deal base.
So far have things gone that when party leaders refer to their base these days no one thinks they are talking about labor, anymore, not even labor leaders or union members.
Everyone knows they are talking about racial and sexual minorities, some of the latter incredibly miniscule, single women, and special interest groups like the environmentalist pressure groups, many of whom the Democrats have regularly sought to please by egregiously sacrificing the interests of the working class as a whole, or anyway the white working class.
And it hasn't done the Democrats any good that no bankers or financial whiz-bangers went to jail for creating the disaster of 2008 and all of the gains of the recovery since, like most of the gains since Bill Clinton, have gone exclusively to make the upper 1% even more fabulously wealthy.
Obama is not the cause of all this, though the periodically visible and at all times unquestionable racial chip on his shoulder has not helped at all and he and his advisers, Al Sharpton especially included, are at fault for that.
And, anyway, this is not what the party folks think is the problem, and they are not spending time thinking how to win back the working class.
Any more than the conservatives understood that it was their control of the Republican Party that lost the election of 2012 for Mitt Romney and continues to limit the ability of the GOP to get a majority during presidential years.
And take a look at this, from Atrios.
But he's not writing about the label, "liberal," which is far from meaning what it used to mean to a whole lot of people, anyway.
What he's really recommending is that Democrats make a lot more of their support for working-class friendly positions so people will perceive them as friends of the little guy.
Get it?
Some Democrats understand the party needs those white working class votes back.
Labeling themselves with a word they and their enemies together have poisoned over the decades, "liberal," would actually hurt in that effort.
Update.
Just as conservatives would rather see the Republicans lose than drop their cause, to repeal over a century of progressivism, today's liberals feel the same way about the Democrats and their cause.
Or, rather, causes, I should say, since they are numerous and, to be fair, include but do not prioritize the interests of the American white working class.
Far from it!
They are themselves captives of the racist elements of their coalition whose politics are an expression of resentment, mistrust, and hatred of white people.
Friday, November 14, 2014
Obama's "climate deal" is a plot to make China richer and more powerful than America
Democratic presidents keep proposing plans that would do nothing significant about global warming - assuming there is really anything that needs to be or could be done - but would seriously hurt the American economy and in equal measure advantage economies of China, India, and other currently comparatively poor countries.
One might note at the same time that such a policy would tremendously advantage those American plutocrats and American financial interests that have so heavily invested in China, India, or elsewhere in what used to be called "The Third World" that they have plenty to gain by a policy that intentionally hurts America to the advantage of those countries.
Plutocrats and huge financial interests that are part of the American Big Money Elites whose influence on American politics by way of their near total control of the major American parties far exceeds that of mere voters.
Sooner or later it might occur to somebody to mention that perhaps this is not a coincidence but is in fact the whole point of the exercise.
The US-China Climate Change Deal Is Terrible; Fortunately, It Doesn't Matter
I have said it before but it bears repeating.
A patriotic policy would seek to preserve American economic and military preeminence, particularly with regard to so potentially dangerous and certainly hostile a power as China, for as long as possible, at least by fair means if not by foul.
The policy of the Democrats in this matter and this deal by Barack Obama in particular are flat out contrary not only to the economic interests of the American 99% but also the national security interests of the United States, and ought to be denounced accordingly.
PS.
In case anyone wonders why the American liberals would be so hot for a treaty that is so obviously contrary to the interests of nearly every American the answer is that protecting or advancing the interests of the American 99% is not their concern and has not been since at least as far back as Bill Clinton's first free trade deal.
Their concern is primarily for the interests of the global 99%, these days, and in this matter of global warming treaties as well as in anything affecting trade and immigration policy what is truly uppermost in their minds is how to advantage the global 99% at whatever cost to the American 99%.
And while that concern is mitigated by their need to look better to the American 99% than the Republicans during election cycles it is certainly not overcome or even much interfered with.
Ask anyone.
The American left from the most ordinary liberals through the reddest radicals are all cosmopolitans, now, and none of them national.
An attitude we see as well behind liberal globalist interventionism, economic, political, and military.
It isn't only the political right that wants to sacrifice American wealth and power to global interests at the cost of Americans.
It's everybody, though occasions differ, as do methods and manner.
One might note at the same time that such a policy would tremendously advantage those American plutocrats and American financial interests that have so heavily invested in China, India, or elsewhere in what used to be called "The Third World" that they have plenty to gain by a policy that intentionally hurts America to the advantage of those countries.
Plutocrats and huge financial interests that are part of the American Big Money Elites whose influence on American politics by way of their near total control of the major American parties far exceeds that of mere voters.
Sooner or later it might occur to somebody to mention that perhaps this is not a coincidence but is in fact the whole point of the exercise.
The US-China Climate Change Deal Is Terrible; Fortunately, It Doesn't Matter
I have said it before but it bears repeating.
A patriotic policy would seek to preserve American economic and military preeminence, particularly with regard to so potentially dangerous and certainly hostile a power as China, for as long as possible, at least by fair means if not by foul.
The policy of the Democrats in this matter and this deal by Barack Obama in particular are flat out contrary not only to the economic interests of the American 99% but also the national security interests of the United States, and ought to be denounced accordingly.
PS.
In case anyone wonders why the American liberals would be so hot for a treaty that is so obviously contrary to the interests of nearly every American the answer is that protecting or advancing the interests of the American 99% is not their concern and has not been since at least as far back as Bill Clinton's first free trade deal.
Their concern is primarily for the interests of the global 99%, these days, and in this matter of global warming treaties as well as in anything affecting trade and immigration policy what is truly uppermost in their minds is how to advantage the global 99% at whatever cost to the American 99%.
And while that concern is mitigated by their need to look better to the American 99% than the Republicans during election cycles it is certainly not overcome or even much interfered with.
Ask anyone.
The American left from the most ordinary liberals through the reddest radicals are all cosmopolitans, now, and none of them national.
An attitude we see as well behind liberal globalist interventionism, economic, political, and military.
It isn't only the political right that wants to sacrifice American wealth and power to global interests at the cost of Americans.
It's everybody, though occasions differ, as do methods and manner.
Monday, April 14, 2014
Liberalism. My last word on Newton's view of the law, maybe.
Reading Eisenhower, The White House Years.
Newton is a great admirer of those who decide cases liberally based on hokum and bombast.
He quotes with admiration Robert Jackson's majority opinion in a 1943 decision upholding the right of Jehovah's Witnesses to refuse to salute the flag in school.
You might wonder why this was anybody's idea of a federal issue, at all.
But never mind.
Newton quotes Jackson.
The first sentence is false as history, the concern for limiting the power of popular majorities being an issue for the men of the Philadelphia convention.
The Bill of Rights was adopted against Madison's urging after the constitution was ratified, and the point was to limit the power of the federal government.
Too, the power of judicial review to which the sentence alludes is in fact not granted in the constitution, and was not even asserted to exist until 1803, when it was immediately and correctly denied, though many might argue not ultimately opportunely, by Jefferson and a great many others.
File that in the drawer marked "Whoppers" in the cabinet of constitutional lacunae.
The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. . . .
The second sentence apparently alludes to an inflated understanding of the First Amendment, conflating a questionable assessment of the effects of the amendment with the amendment itself.
And then again it, as well as the first sentence, also supposes that the same amendment binds the states and not, as the amendment says, the federal congress.
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
This is how liberals write when they decide to claim that the constitution forbids or requires something, though they can find nothing in the constitution that actually does so.
Too, Newton was (of course!) a great admirer of Hugo Black's insistence again and again in his opinions that the privileges or immunities clause of the 14th Amendment "incorporates" the Bill of Rights and means that state law can no more violate its constraints on government than can federal law.
The clause, cut and pasted from the privileges and immunities clause of Article IV, itself cut and pasted from the Articles of Confederation where it had a reasonably clear meaning and real significance, reads as follows in the 14th Amendment.
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States
This is how it looks in the US constitution's Article IV, already commonly misread.
The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.
And this is how it originally looked in the Articles of Confederation, Article IV.
The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different States in this Union, the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States; and the people of each State shall free ingress and regress to and from any other State, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject to the same duties, impositions, and restrictions as the inhabitants thereof respectively, provided that such restrictions shall not extend so far as to prevent the removal of property imported into any State, to any other State, of which the owner is an inhabitant; provided also that no imposition, duties or restriction shall be laid by any State, on the property of the United States, or either of them.
In sum, as its context within the entire article substantiates, and with the noted exceptions, if you are a "free inhabitant" of state A passing through or sojourning in state B you shall have the privileges and immunities under the law of state B that belong to "free citizens" of state B.
You cannot be denied them, exceptions noted.
The meaning is the same in Article IV of the constitution.
Black's view of the clause in the 14th Amendment is today CATO's position and the position of many liberals, though that opinion and the entire notion of incorporation continue to be rejected by those who do not accept that this one amendment so radically altered, or was meant or even imagined to so radically alter, the character of the constitution and the union.
And there is no clear evidence that the originator, those who passed it in Congress, or those who ratified it in the states ever intended by it to make so great a constitutional revolution as to impose the huge, radical, and novel limitation on state power that would be entailed by forcing state law to comport with the restrictions imposed on the federal government by the Bill of Rights.
And that is really the point.
To read the clause as CATO wishes is to accept that it created very radical and new privileges and immunities for citizens of the United States, privileges and immunities that did not exist beforehand, for example, privileges or immunities from state laws establishing religion or abridging the freedom of the press, or state laws denying jury trials for state offenses.
And yet from its very wording we see the clause allegedly is concerned to protect citizens from abridgment of existing privileges or immunities.
Anyway, the earliest judicial interpreters rejected the view Black espoused and CATO now espouses, alongside numerous liberals.
If CATO is really right about what was meant by that clause you would expect a lot of people would have been howling about it, right then, leaving no doubt the court was full of beans.
As for me, I see the thing as basically gibberish, passed by group-think under the pressures of the Reconstruction Era, in keeping with the traditional, urgent political syllogism,
Something must be done.
This is something.
This must be done.
And were the civil war amendments actually adopted and ratified lawfully, in accord with Article V, fairly interpreted?
Update, for the record and in aid of understanding the significance of the Bill of Rights, here is what the federal congress sent to the states, minus the two that failed.
Newton is a great admirer of those who decide cases liberally based on hokum and bombast.
He quotes with admiration Robert Jackson's majority opinion in a 1943 decision upholding the right of Jehovah's Witnesses to refuse to salute the flag in school.
You might wonder why this was anybody's idea of a federal issue, at all.
But never mind.
Newton quotes Jackson.
The first sentence is false as history, the concern for limiting the power of popular majorities being an issue for the men of the Philadelphia convention.
The Bill of Rights was adopted against Madison's urging after the constitution was ratified, and the point was to limit the power of the federal government.
Too, the power of judicial review to which the sentence alludes is in fact not granted in the constitution, and was not even asserted to exist until 1803, when it was immediately and correctly denied, though many might argue not ultimately opportunely, by Jefferson and a great many others.
File that in the drawer marked "Whoppers" in the cabinet of constitutional lacunae.
The very purpose of the Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. . . .
The second sentence apparently alludes to an inflated understanding of the First Amendment, conflating a questionable assessment of the effects of the amendment with the amendment itself.
And then again it, as well as the first sentence, also supposes that the same amendment binds the states and not, as the amendment says, the federal congress.
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
This is how liberals write when they decide to claim that the constitution forbids or requires something, though they can find nothing in the constitution that actually does so.
Too, Newton was (of course!) a great admirer of Hugo Black's insistence again and again in his opinions that the privileges or immunities clause of the 14th Amendment "incorporates" the Bill of Rights and means that state law can no more violate its constraints on government than can federal law.
The clause, cut and pasted from the privileges and immunities clause of Article IV, itself cut and pasted from the Articles of Confederation where it had a reasonably clear meaning and real significance, reads as follows in the 14th Amendment.
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States
This is how it looks in the US constitution's Article IV, already commonly misread.
The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.
And this is how it originally looked in the Articles of Confederation, Article IV.
The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different States in this Union, the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States; and the people of each State shall free ingress and regress to and from any other State, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject to the same duties, impositions, and restrictions as the inhabitants thereof respectively, provided that such restrictions shall not extend so far as to prevent the removal of property imported into any State, to any other State, of which the owner is an inhabitant; provided also that no imposition, duties or restriction shall be laid by any State, on the property of the United States, or either of them.
In sum, as its context within the entire article substantiates, and with the noted exceptions, if you are a "free inhabitant" of state A passing through or sojourning in state B you shall have the privileges and immunities under the law of state B that belong to "free citizens" of state B.
You cannot be denied them, exceptions noted.
The meaning is the same in Article IV of the constitution.
Black's view of the clause in the 14th Amendment is today CATO's position and the position of many liberals, though that opinion and the entire notion of incorporation continue to be rejected by those who do not accept that this one amendment so radically altered, or was meant or even imagined to so radically alter, the character of the constitution and the union.
And there is no clear evidence that the originator, those who passed it in Congress, or those who ratified it in the states ever intended by it to make so great a constitutional revolution as to impose the huge, radical, and novel limitation on state power that would be entailed by forcing state law to comport with the restrictions imposed on the federal government by the Bill of Rights.
And that is really the point.
To read the clause as CATO wishes is to accept that it created very radical and new privileges and immunities for citizens of the United States, privileges and immunities that did not exist beforehand, for example, privileges or immunities from state laws establishing religion or abridging the freedom of the press, or state laws denying jury trials for state offenses.
And yet from its very wording we see the clause allegedly is concerned to protect citizens from abridgment of existing privileges or immunities.
Anyway, the earliest judicial interpreters rejected the view Black espoused and CATO now espouses, alongside numerous liberals.
If CATO is really right about what was meant by that clause you would expect a lot of people would have been howling about it, right then, leaving no doubt the court was full of beans.
As for me, I see the thing as basically gibberish, passed by group-think under the pressures of the Reconstruction Era, in keeping with the traditional, urgent political syllogism,
Something must be done.
This is something.
This must be done.
And were the civil war amendments actually adopted and ratified lawfully, in accord with Article V, fairly interpreted?
Update, for the record and in aid of understanding the significance of the Bill of Rights, here is what the federal congress sent to the states, minus the two that failed.
Congress of the United States begun and held at the City of
New-York, on Wednesday the fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and
eighty nine.
THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the
time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to
prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and
restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public
confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its
institution.
RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the
United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses
concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the
several States, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all, or
any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures,
to be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution; viz.
ARTICLES in addition to, and Amendment of the Constitution
of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the
Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the fifth Article of the
original Constitution.
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and
to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Amendment II
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of
a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be
infringed.
Amendment III
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any
house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to
be prescribed by law.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons,
houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall
not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be
searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or
otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand
Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia,
when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be
subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor
shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be
deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall
private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the
right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and
district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have
been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause
of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have
compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the
Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Amendment VII
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall
exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no
fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United
States, than according to the rules of the common law.
Amendment VIII
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines
imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights,
shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the
Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively,
or to the people.
The above ten amendments were ratified December 15, 1791.
Update 2.
This is Section 1 of the 14th Amendment.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and
subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of
the State wherein they reside.
No State shall make or enforce any law which
shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor
shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due
process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal
protection of the laws.
Since its passage and especially since about mid-20th Century and ever increasingly, the Supreme Court has erected upon the three clauses of its second sentence an awesome dictatorship over the states, with much spillover onto the federal government, entirely owing to astonishing fairy tales about their meaning.
The Congress has often followed the trail blazed by the courts.
The due process clause repeats that of the Fifth Amendment and insists upon the lawfulness of the most crucial exercises of fundamental executive power.
The equal protection clause was imposed to deal with the refusal of white-dominated state governments to afford the protection of the law, the literal protection of the law, to blacks against waves of terrorism and crime in which those governments, or officials of them, were often personally complicit.
It is about prosecuting and punishing crimes against blacks - against anyone - with the same rigor as those against whites - or other, and that is all it is about.
As to privileges or immunities, enough said, above.
Thursday, March 13, 2014
US out of Putin's face!
The media are full of people insisting the US has to make Putin pay for actions in the Ukraine obviously aimed at keeping the Crimea secure for the Russian navy and preventing Ukraine turning into a very, very forward NATO base.
Those people include the President, his SECDEF, and many of his supporters in office, in the media, or in "think tanks" whose job is to keep America the world's number one meddler in other people's affairs.
Relatively few and relatively quiet are those who oppose American meddling, though they seem more numerous or noisy on the right than on the left.
Let me clarify.
Many major Democrat sites are simply ignoring the whole thing.
That they don't endorse the madness is a good thing.
That they don't criticize the madness is a blatant reflection of bias.
The whole Ukraine affair is incredibly stupid, in large part our own fault for encouraging the coup and now insisting on legitimating the illegal new government, and anyways none of our business.
How many Americans need to go without food stamps or health insurance so we can float a billion in guaranteed loans to buy the Ukraine for NATO?
How many elderly have to eat cat food because we can't afford to give them a raise in their Social Security payments because we are spending other billions worldwide aimed at weakening Russia?
What the hell is all this nonsense?
And on the other side of the planet, recall that Reagan got credit for destroying the Soviet Union by forcing them to spend beyond their means on the military to keep up with us.
According to the conservatives, this imposed such economic hardship on the country that the peoples of the USSR refused to take it any more and made a revolution.
What will happen when we go bust trying to keep up with China and Russia as both countries, especially China, grow rich enough and more than rich enough to spend us into the ground?
And in the case of China this will be largely because our neoliberal trade policies enriched China by impoverishing America!
Those people include the President, his SECDEF, and many of his supporters in office, in the media, or in "think tanks" whose job is to keep America the world's number one meddler in other people's affairs.
Relatively few and relatively quiet are those who oppose American meddling, though they seem more numerous or noisy on the right than on the left.
Let me clarify.
Many major Democrat sites are simply ignoring the whole thing.
That they don't endorse the madness is a good thing.
That they don't criticize the madness is a blatant reflection of bias.
The whole Ukraine affair is incredibly stupid, in large part our own fault for encouraging the coup and now insisting on legitimating the illegal new government, and anyways none of our business.
How many Americans need to go without food stamps or health insurance so we can float a billion in guaranteed loans to buy the Ukraine for NATO?
How many elderly have to eat cat food because we can't afford to give them a raise in their Social Security payments because we are spending other billions worldwide aimed at weakening Russia?
What the hell is all this nonsense?
And on the other side of the planet, recall that Reagan got credit for destroying the Soviet Union by forcing them to spend beyond their means on the military to keep up with us.
According to the conservatives, this imposed such economic hardship on the country that the peoples of the USSR refused to take it any more and made a revolution.
What will happen when we go bust trying to keep up with China and Russia as both countries, especially China, grow rich enough and more than rich enough to spend us into the ground?
And in the case of China this will be largely because our neoliberal trade policies enriched China by impoverishing America!
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