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Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? Bernie Sanders wants to know who owns America?

#13401 User is online   johnu 

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Posted 2019-August-13, 17:00

Another feel good story from the right fringe:

Far-Right Trump Fan Bill Mitchell May Have Just Duped Followers Out Of $14,000

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Far-right Trump supporter Bill Mitchell ― a conspiracy-theory-mongering internet talk show host once described as the “post-truth, post-math” antithesis of polling analyst Nate Silver ― has recently made some enemies.

After asking his followers for $15,000 on a GoFundMe page purportedly to move his YourVoice America program from Palm Beach, Florida, to Washington, D.C., he relocated to Miami instead, and no one seems to know where the money went.

Ahhhh Billy - Nice try but you will have to up your game to match your master, the Con Man and Grifter in Chief.
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#13402 User is online   johnu 

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Posted 2019-August-13, 21:29

Trump rips emolument lawsuits: Being president 'costing me a fortune'

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"This thing is costing me a fortune being president," Trump said. "Somebody said, 'oh he might have rented a room to a man from Saudi Arabia for $500.' What about the $5 billion I'll lose?"

There's no evidence to support Trump's claim that the presidency has cost him billions. He has refused to release his tax returns, making it difficult to accurately assess his wealth. But his latest financial disclosure forms show his properties earned tens of millions of dollars in the past year.

Watchdogs have raised concerns about the president's decision not to put his company in a blind trust, noting that lobbyists, foreign officials and political insiders may frequent his businesses to earn favor with the administration.

More bullsh*t from the Manchurian President and Con Man and Grifter in Chief. In fact, a 5 billion loss would be billions more than his net worth, so if that happened, he would be billions in debt if he was telling the truth. This is one of thousands of examples of the Racist in Chief denying an accusation by claiming the exact opposite has actually happened. Nobody should be surprised that he didn't mention the hundreds of millions of dollars his company and family members have raked in from sweetheart loans and business deals that were made only because he is the POTUS.
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#13403 User is online   johnu 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 04:28

You can "learn" something every day if you read the news :rolleyes:

Ken Cuccinelli: Statue Of Liberty Poem About ‘People Coming From Europe’

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CNN journalist Erin Burnett was asking Cuccinelli about his earlier interview with NPR, in which he reworded the Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus,” saying: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge.”

“‘Wretched,’ ‘poor,’ refuse’ - right? That’s what the poem says America is supposed to stand for. So what do you think America stands for?” Burnett asked Cuccinelli.

“Well, of course, that poem was referring back to people coming from Europe,” Cucinelli answered, “where they had class-based societies, where people were considered wretched if they weren’t in the right class ... And it was written one year after the first federal public charge rule was written.”

It is unclear why Cucinelli felt the need to specify the group of immigrants Lazarus was referring to. The poem itself describes the Statue of Liberty by saying, “From her beacon-hand/ Glows world-wide welcome.”

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#13404 User is online   johnu 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 04:39

George Conway Runs Out Of Words To Describe Trump’s Latest Bonkers ‘Rally’

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At one point, as he has done some 75 times before according to the Toronto Star, Trump took credit for signing the Veterans Choice health care program into law.

It was actually signed by President Barack Obama in 2014.

At another point, he suggested the main U.S. export to Japan is wheat.

“They send us thousands and thousands, millions, of cars,” Trump said. “We send them wheat. Wheat! That’s not a good deal.”

But the website of the U.S. Trade Representative ― part of the Executive Office of the President ― notes that wheat is just $698 million of $120.4 billion in U.S. exports to Japan.

Trump even seemed to think the afternoon event was taking place in the morning.

It has not been confirmed that G Conway's keyboard broke under the strain of overusage in trying to document all of the Manchurian President's lies and unhinged comments.
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#13405 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 07:50

From Ross Douthat at NYT:

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The challenge in thinking about a case like the suspicious suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, the supposed “billionaire” who spent his life acquiring sex slaves and serving as a procurer to the ruling class, can be summed up in two sentences. Most conspiracy theories are false. But often some of the things they’re trying to explain are real.

Conspiracy theories are usually false because the people who come up with them are outsiders to power, trying to impose narrative order on a world they don’t fully understand — which leads them to imagine implausible scenarios and impossible plots, to settle on ideologically convenient villains and assume the absolute worst about their motives, and to imagine an omnicompetence among the corrupt and conniving that doesn’t actually exist.

Or they are false because the people who come up with them are insiders trying to deflect blame for their own failings, by blaming a malign enemy within or an evil-genius rival for problems that their own blunders helped create.

Or they are false because the people pushing them are cynical manipulators and attention-seekers trying to build a following who don’t care a whit about the truth.

For all these reasons serious truth-seekers are predisposed to disbelieve conspiracy theories on principle, and journalists especially are predisposed to quote Richard Hofstadter on the “paranoid style” whenever they encounter one — an instinct only sharpened by the rise of Donald Trump, the cynical conspiracist par excellence.

But this dismissiveness can itself become an intellectual mistake, a way to sneer at speculation while ignoring an underlying reality that deserves attention or investigation. Sometimes that reality is a conspiracy in full, a secret effort to pursue a shared objective or conceal something important from the public. Sometimes it’s a kind of unconscious connivance, in which institutions and actors behave in seemingly concerted ways because of shared assumptions and self-interest. But in either case, an admirable desire to reject bad or wicked theories can lead to a blindness about something important that these theories are trying to explain.

Here are some diverse examples. Start with U.F.O. theories, a reliable hotbed of the first kind of conspiracizing — implausible popular stories about hidden elite machinations.

It is simple wisdom to assume that any conspiratorial Fox Mulder-level master narrative about little gray men or lizard people is rubbish. Yet at the same time it is a simple fact that the U.F.O. era began, in Roswell, N.M., with a government lie intended to conceal secret military experiments; it is also a simple fact, lately reported in this very newspaper, that the military has been conducting secret studies of unidentified-flying-object incidents that continue to defy obvious explanations.

So the correct attitude toward U.F.O.s cannot be a simple Hofstadterian dismissiveness about the paranoia of the cranks. Instead, you have to be able to reject outlandish theories and acknowledge a pattern of government lies and secrecy around a weird, persistent, unexplained feature of human experience — which we know about in part because the U.F.O. conspiracy theorists keep banging on about their subject. The wild theories are false; even so, the secrets and mysteries are real.

Another example: The current elite anxiety about Russia’s hand in the West’s populist disturbances, which reached a particularly hysterical pitch with the pre-Mueller report collusion coverage, is a classic example of how conspiracy theories find a purchase in the supposedly sensible center — in this case, because their narrative conveniently explains a cascade of elite failures by blaming populism on Russian hackers, moneymen and bots.

And yet: Every conservative who rolls her or his eyes at the “Russia hoax” is in danger of dismissing the reality that there is a Russian plot against the West — an organized effort to use hacks, bots and rubles to sow discord in the United States and Western Europe. This effort is far weaker and less consequential than the paranoid center believes, it doesn’t involve fanciful “Trump has been a Russian asset since the ’80s” machinations … but it also isn’t something that Rachel Maddow just made up. The hysteria is overdrawn and paranoid; even so, the Russian conspiracy is real.

A third example: Marianne Williamson’s long-shot candidacy for the Democratic nomination has elevated the holistic-crunchy critique of modern medicine, which often shades into a conspiratorial view that a dark corporate alliance is actively conspiring against American health, that the medical establishment is consciously lying to patients about what might make them well or sick. Because this narrative has given anti-vaccine fervor a huge boost, there’s understandable desire among anti-conspiracists to hold the line against anything that seems like a crankish or quackish criticism of the medical consensus.

But if you aren’t somewhat paranoid about how often corporations cover up the dangers of their products, and somewhat paranoid about how drug companies in particular influence the medical consensus and encourage overprescription — well, then I have an opioid crisis you might be interested in reading about. You don’t need the centralized conspiracy to get a big medical wrong turn; all it takes is the right convergence of financial incentives with institutional groupthink. Which makes it important to keep an open mind about medical issues that are genuinely unsettled, even if the people raising questions seem prone to conspiracy-think. The medical consensus is generally a better guide than crankishness; even so, the tendency of cranks to predict medical scandals before they’re recognized is real.

Finally, a fourth example, circling back to Epstein: the conspiracy theories about networks of powerful pedophiles, which have proliferated with the internet and peaked, for now, with the QAnon fantasy among Trump supporters.

I say fantasy because the details of the QAnon narrative are plainly false: Donald Trump is not personally supervising an operation against “deep state” child sex traffickers any more than my 3-year-old is captaining a pirate ship.

But the premise of the QAnon fantasia, that certain elite networks of influence, complicity and blackmail have enabled sexual predators to exploit victims on an extraordinary scale — well, that isn’t a conspiracy theory, is it? That seems to just be true.

And not only true of Epstein and his pals. As I’ve written before, when I was starting my career as a journalist I sometimes brushed up against people peddling a story about a network of predators in the Catholic hierarchy — not just pedophile priests, but a self-protecting cabal above them — that seemed like a classic case of the paranoid style, a wild overstatement of the scandal’s scope. I dismissed them then as conspiracy theorists, and indeed they had many of conspiracism’s vices — above all, a desire to believe that the scandal they were describing could be laid entirely at the door of their theological enemies, liberal or traditional.

But on many important points and important names, they were simply right.

Likewise with the secular world’s predators. Imagine being told the scope of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged operation before it all came crashing down — not just the ex-Mossad black ops element but the possibility that his entire production company also acted as a procurement-and-protection operation for one of its founders. A conspiracy theory, surely! Imagine being told all we know about the late, unlamented Epstein — that he wasn’t just a louche billionaire (wasn’t, indeed, a proper billionaire at all) but a man mysteriously made and mysteriously protected who ran a pedophile island with a temple to an unknown god and plotted his own “Boys From Brazil” endgame in plain sight of his Harvard-D.C.-House of Windsor pals. Too wild to be believed!

And yet.

Where networks of predation and blackmail are concerned, then, the distinction I’m drawing between conspiracy theories and underlying realities weakens just a bit. No, you still don’t want to listen to QAnon, or to our disgraceful president when he retweets rants about the #ClintonBodyCount. But just as Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s network of clerical allies and enablers hasn’t been rolled up, and the fall of Bryan Singer probably didn’t get us near the rancid depths of Hollywood’s youth-exploitation racket, we clearly haven’t gotten to the bottom of what was going on with Epstein.

So to worry too much about online paranoia outracing reality is to miss the most important journalistic task, which is the further unraveling of scandals that would have seemed, until now, too implausible to be believed.

Yes, by all means, resist the tendency toward unfounded speculation and cynical partisan manipulation. But also recognize that in the case of Jeffrey Epstein and his circle, the conspiracy was real.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#13406 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 08:21

So, as it turns out the economy is not as great as promoted

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The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis measured 2018 growth at 2.9 percent, matching the peak Obama enjoyed in 2015.
For the rest of the president’s term, economic forecasters agree, that number will decline.
, and now is signaling a normal recession.

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Aug 14 - Yields on U.S. 10-year Treasury notes slid below those on two-year notes on Wednesday, delivering a reliable recession signal and sending shudders through global financial markets.


I wonder if the religious right who support him will still give an Amen when that happens?
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#13407 User is offline   barmar 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 08:56

View PostWinstonm, on 2019-August-14, 08:21, said:

So, as it turns out the economy is not as great as promoted , and now is signaling a normal recession.

I wonder if the religious right who support him will still give an Amen when that happens?

Isn't it a little early to count those chickens? The Fed still has some say in whether we'll actually get a recession. And the Trump-era ecnonomy has been surprising us for years.

And even if the recession does happen, Trump will manage to spin it like everything else. It will be fake news, or China's fault, or because of all those immigrants getting public handouts; heck, he could probably find a way to blame it on Brexit or North Korea, or because the wall hasn't gone up fast enough.

#13408 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 08:59

View PostWinstonm, on 2019-August-14, 08:21, said:

So, as it turns out the economy is not as great as promoted , and now is signaling a normal recession.

I wonder if the religious right who support him will still give an Amen when that happens?

God is the one who installs kings and establishes kings and removes kings. Come on. -- Daniel 2
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#13409 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 09:02

From No Need to Deport Me. This Dreamer’s Dream Is Dead. by Tawheeda Wahabzada at NYT:

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I am a Dreamer. I have lived in the United States since 1995. I plan to self-deport in early 2020.

I grew up in Carson City, Nev., from kindergarten until I left for college in Reno. I’ve celebrated Thanksgiving for as long as I can remember. I participated in local soccer leagues as a kid. I pledged allegiance to the American flag. This is the country I call home.

Because of circumstances beyond my control, I am undocumented. I was born in Toronto and was brought to the United States at age 5 by my parents, who were refugees from Afghanistan. I am one of the approximately 700,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients in America today. As a result, I have lived my life in perpetual limbo — and in the shadows.

When I turned 18, I watched my friends vote in the 2008 presidential elections and could not do the same. I could not receive federal financial aid for colleges that other prospective students applied for. I watched my classmates get jobs and obtain a driver’s licenses, but I could not work or drive legally.

When President Barack Obama introduced DACA at his Rose Garden speech in June 2012, he said: “This is not a path to citizenship. It’s not a permanent fix. This is a temporary stopgap measure that lets us focus our resources wisely while giving a degree of relief and hope to talented, driven, patriotic young people.” However, DACA was immediately met with criticism from the right that it is unconstitutional, an improper use of executive powers or some form of amnesty. I and all DACA recipients remain caught in the middle.

DACA changed my life. In May 2012, I graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno, with a double major in international affairs and French. I was worried, uncertain and ready to leave the country. There were zero possibilities for me to work legally. Serendipitously, President Obama introduced DACA the next month, so I decided to stay. Until then, I had no idea what future I could have. My dream was to pursue a career in human rights and international affairs. I saw that as an absolute pipe dream, because someone with undocumented status cannot freely travel abroad.

Under DACA, I obtained my driver’s license. I later earned my master’s degree from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. While I was a graduate student, I interned for former Senate majority leader Harry Reid. I eventually found work in Washington, where I am pursuing a career at an NGO promoting the transparency and accountability of governments throughout the world. I could even travel abroad for work purposes. This has been a lifeline, for which I am grateful. But DACA is not a permanent fix.

While I once felt hopeful about a future here in my country, my hopes have been shattered repeatedly. There were many close calls for a permanent solution, yet my very existence in my country remains in jeopardy.

In 2010, the Dream Act, which would have provided a pathway to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants, was proposed during a lame-duck session. It passed the House, but it was just five votes shy of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster in the Senate. Those five votes cost me my future as an American.

In 2012, when DACA was introduced, I thought it could be a steppingstone to having permanent status. However in September 2017, the Trump administration announced its plans to terminate DACA by March 5, 2018 — though injunctions from lower courts allowed applications to still be received. Recently, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, but with a conservative-leaning court, there is greater potential for DACA to end.

This is why I am leaving the United States. I am 29. I have waited 24 years for a solution. Like all DACA recipients, I have been living my life in two-year increments — the duration of my temporary status. I will no longer keep waiting for the idea of a pathway to citizenship.

In my case, being undocumented is a civil violation. Undocumented immigrants who self-deport after spending over 180 days in the United States face a three-year bar on re-entry, while those like me who have spent over a year in the country are barred for 10 years. For trying to find a solution to an untenable situation and freedom from uncertainty, I will be banished.

Leaving the United States is deeply saddening. The 10-year bar is the most painful aspect, as I will not be able to visit family and friends. I cannot attend graduations, weddings or funerals. I will especially miss my grandmother — who helped raise me and is my best friend — as I don’t know how often I will see her after I depart. If I stay, I’m waiting on the Supreme Court decision: I will either be able to continue my life in limbo as a DACA recipient or my status will phase out.

Congress has the ability to remove these bars, a remnant from the Clinton era, which would open up pathways for possible return. It would, for instance, allow for employment sponsorship, visas to continue working in the fields in which we’ve made inroads. And most important, it would allow us to reunite with our families, friends and neighbors. It would mean we could come back “legally.” Two Democratic presidential candidates, Julián Castro and Elizabeth Warren, have pledged to remove the bars under their immigration proposals. They would have to petition Congress to do so.

Depending on the outcome of the 2020 elections, there could be a push for immigration legislation, but whether it will include DACA recipients, piecemeal or comprehensively, I do not know. It’s not guaranteed anything will pass. No one knows what might happen, but I do know that I’ve become exhausted by putting my life on hold for a promise of permanent status that might never be fulfilled.

The ugly politics of the United States leave me with no desirable choice. I no longer wish to be a bargaining chip for a border wall. I am no longer willing to be another sob story to win votes. I can no longer go to bed every night with the anxiety of such an unsecure future. But I am privileged that by chance I was born in a high-income country to which I can easily return. I am privileged to have the agency to leave.

Isn’t that the great irony? To live the American dream of opportunity and autonomy, I must leave.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#13410 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 09:37

From Seth Masket at Mischiefs of Faction:

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The figure below shows the share of donors received by each candidate among a) all donors, b) all candidate-and-committee donors, and c) candidate-and-committee donors at $1,000 and up. Candidates are listed in declining order of $1,000-and-up candidate-and-committee donors.

Posted Image

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Some fascinating patterns can be seen in here. For one, although Senator Bernie Sanders has by far the greatest share of overall donors (20 percent of the total), he has less than four percent of the candidate-and-committee donors. And it would be hard to say that those candidate-and-committee donors have a clear favorite: their support is split between former Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Kamala Harris, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Warren has a slight edge over the other three among candidate-and-committee donors, while Biden and Harris have a slight edge over the other two in terms of the $1,000-and-up candidate-and-committee donors. But the best interpretation is that there really is no party favorite in this contest, at least as revealed by fundraising patterns. Senators Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, and Kirsten Gillibrand, along with former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and possibly Washington Governor Jay Inslee, seem to occupy a solid second tier of candidates.

This in itself is an important lesson, and is consistent with other scholarly and journalistic accounts suggesting that the party, broadly speaking, has not sent a clear indicator of its preferences for its presidential nominee in 2020. Joe Biden maintains a significant advantage in terms of public opinion polls, but in terms of endorsements, activist sentiments, fundraising, and other indicators of party preferences, the party seems to have a short list of candidates it likes, but has not decided among them.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#13411 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 09:48

View Postbarmar, on 2019-August-14, 08:56, said:

Isn't it a little early to count those chickens? The Fed still has some say in whether we'll actually get a recession. And the Trump-era ecnonomy has been surprising us for years.

And even if the recession does happen, Trump will manage to spin it like everything else. It will be fake news, or China's fault, or because of all those immigrants getting public handouts; heck, he could probably find a way to blame it on Brexit or North Korea, or because the wall hasn't gone up fast enough.


Early? About 22 months, on average, or so says the inversion.

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The U.S. curve has inverted before each recession in the past 50 years. It offered a false signal just once in that time.



Does anyone actually listen or care anymore what this moron says?

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President Donald Trump on Wednesday bashed the Federal Reserve over interest-rate policy and defended tariffs, as U.S. stocks fell across the board.


The Narcissist-in-chief cannot be wrong or to blame. :(
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#13412 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 09:52

View Posty66, on 2019-August-14, 08:59, said:

God is the one who installs kings and establishes kings and removes kings. Come on. -- Daniel 2


Sound quote if you are a member of The Family:

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....the Family is a coalition of elite evangelical Christian men who hold positions of governmental authority both here and abroad. They organize the annual National Prayer Breakfast that’s hosted every American president since Eisenhower, and they establish and run Bible-study groups around the country. Driven by the belief that they’re God’s “chosen,” hand-selected by Him to lead, they spread the gospel far and wide—and, in doing so, shore up political and social influence right beneath the population’s nose.

Their unabashed goal is a global Christian theocracy—no morality, or democracy, required.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#13413 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 11:24

Here is why the American Christian Taliban continue to support Individual-1:

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The Trump Justice Department is urging the federal employment rights agency to change its position and tell the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that businesses can discriminate against transgender employees without violating the law, according to sources familiar with the deliberations

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#13414 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 11:28

From Amy Erica Smith at Mischiefs of Faction:

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Parties worldwide are changing in strikingly consistent ways. Some issues are coming to matter more and others less. Some types of parties are growing and others dying. And everywhere, voters are connecting with politicians in new ways. These changes give us mischiefs of faction a lot to write about.*

Change 1: It’s not necessarily the economy, stupid. New issues may rival and even surpass economics as the main thing parties fight over.

In a provocative New York Times Op-Ed a few days ago, Sylvie Kauffmann declared that “global warming and immigration are replacing traditional left-right defining issues” in Europe.

It will likely surprise exactly zero of my readers that parties opposing immigration are gaining ground in many democracies. In mainland Europe, examples abound: Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly National Front) party in France, Italy’s Lega party, or Sweden’s Nazi-derived Social Democrats. Across the channel, as Chris Williams will argue here at Michiefs of Faction later today, the “remain” versus “leave” question has become the most salient issue in voters’ party choices. And in the US…well, I think I may have heard Republican politicians mention something about immigration once or twice recently.

Nationalists don't always target foreigners. Following its return to power in 2014, India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has increasingly appealed to Hindu voters by targeting non-Hindus. The most jarring example is the recent elimination of the regional autonomy of the Muslim-majority Kashmir province.

Elsewhere, the ascendant new right is focused on other issues. In Latin America, attitudes on homosexuality and punitive anti-crime attitudes increasingly affect vote choice. And my new research shows that in Brazil, the overt racial prejudice of far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro made race unusually predictive of the 2018 vote.

On the European left, Kauffmann argues that environmental protection has come to be the single most important issue for young voters. In the current US Democratic primary, a growing slice of voters and candidates also makes the environment their top issue.

Not to say that traditional left-right issues are irrelevant. Legislatures spend a lot of time addressing issues like inequality, unemployment, regulations, health care, and pensions. Perceptions of how the government is doing, and attitudes about what it should do, still matter for voting -- very likely everywhere in the world.

But some evidence suggests the economy may matter less than it used to. Take US debates over the causes of Trump’s 2016 win as an example. Various academic studies conclude that, as Diana Mutz wrote, “changes in the parties’ positions on...issues that threaten white Americans’ sense of dominant group status” were what attracted voters to Trump -- not economics.

These trends leave us with a lot of questions, though. When a party pivots to focus on a new issue, some politicians and voters enter its coalition and others leave. Who? The details of changing party coalitions provide clues to guessing the future.

As new issues come to the fore, positions on traditional issues change, too. Nationalism may change economic ideologies in rightist parties -- the US’ increasing skepticism on trade under Trump being perhaps the starkest example. Neoliberalism is so 1999. Yet, tellingly, across the globe, business elites largely appear to be sticking with rightist parties, at least for the moment.

Here’s another question: We can describe how these changes are happening, but why? It’s tempting to focus on the idiosyncracies of each case.

In the UK, Brexit came to dominate the party scene because of...well, it’s a mess. (See Chris Williams later today.) In Brazil, we can trace the rise of the new right to declining trust in government in the wake of the Operation Car Wash corruption scandal. In many places in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, we can also point to the rise of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity. In mainland Europe, Syrian immigration also played a big role. In the US, cultural backlash in the wake of Barack Obama’s election might have something to do with it.

But those explanations aren’t fully satisfying. When changes come in waves, it seems unlikely that individual sui generis explanations are enough to explain patterns.

What could be triggering the rise of a new right increasingly focused on culture war rather than economic issues in country after country? Maybe this convergence is the work of globalized networks of nationalists, often originating in the United States and Russia. Social media is another intriguing hypothesis I’ll explore further in coming weeks.

The answer might involve big cross-national economic and sociological factors. Rising inequality might lead rightist parties to pivot towards culture war issues on which they are more likely to win. Alternatively, growing economic security might enable both rightist and leftist parties increasingly to focus on what Inglehart terms “postmaterialist” issues that cannot be reduced to economics.

And perhaps it’s driven in part by climate change. As drought, heat, and flooding cause economic dislocation in equatorial regions, rising migration from Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America to Europe and the US can cause cultural backlash.

Change 2: The party is dead. Long-live the party.

The issue entrepreneurs who champion new issues often gravitate to new parties or party factions. Old parties and factions don’t always keep up. Sometimes they reinvent themselves; sometimes they fail. In his piece later today, Chris Williams explains how the Tory and Labor Parties’ mixed and ambiguous positions on Brexit opened the space for the new Brexit Party, as well as growth of the Liberal Democrats. Yet in the US, what was formerly a faction of the Republican Party has successfully transformed the party in its image.

Across Latin America, recent decades have brought the deaths of long-standing parties and even party systems -- the consequence of parties diluting their brands and failing to maintain linkages with voters. In their wakes, new parties have arisen. Yet in newly democratizing Sub-Saharan Africa, the persistence of strong parties that had formerly ruled their countries under authoritarianism has stabilized party systems.

When do parties pivot to take on new issues? When do they refuse or fail? When do parties become unable to maintain their links with voters?

Political science is a probabilistic field. What we call “Duverger’s Law” is one of the few empirical regularities we're willing to give that moniker. Duverger tells us that when elections use plurality rules for selecting representatives -- that is, when only one candidate, the top vote-getter, wins -- they tend to have fewer parties than when elections are decided using proportional representation (PR). Under PR, multiple candidates win in a district, in proportion to their votes.

Plurality rules are most common in the UK and its former colonies. So, Duverger’s law helps us predict that in the US, the overlapping, centripetal effects of plurality races for executive and legislative office strongly favor a two-party system. If a new party starts winning elections, it will do so at the expense of an existing party.

But Duverger didn't tell us anything about what those parties would be. We can’t know at the outset which parties will win or lose, or what they will compete over. Nor can we know whether any particular party will adapt to new conditions or instead go the way of the dodo and the Whig Party. Those questions remain for other political scientists.

It’s also worth noting that the UK’s current partisan mess that Chris Williams will describe later today -- the rise of multiple parties unable individually to muster a majority of Parliament -- appears partially to “defy” Duverger’s Law. This is what a party system in flux looks. Still, we can predict that in the long term, the psychological and mechanical effects of plurality voting rules will winnow the partisan field in the UK.

Change 3: Global authoritarianism is on the rise, too.

We are in the midst of a global wave of “autocratization,” in which the number of democratic regimes is falling and the number of authoritarian regimes is rising.

In the past couple of decades, former democracies around the world have become “hybrid” regimes -- ones where increasingly authoritarian parties have consolidated power but continued to hold regular, multiparty (but not free or fair) elections. Think of United Russia, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, and Hungary’s Fidesz. Meanwhile, authoritarianism appears to have deepened in what is arguably the world’s most important, long-standing authoritarian party, the Chinese Communist Party.

I doubt the wave of autocratization has crested. A decade from now, some current incumbent parties in democratic systems may well have become authoritarian parties overseeing hybrid regimes. How will these changes happen? We might speculate about some likely suspects (I won’t here*), but can we measure likelihood of autocratization? How do we know which countries will actually autocratize? Over the next decade, it will be important to track which parties succeed in consolidating power, and which party systems successfully resist members’ authoritarian impulses.

Change 4: Voters and politicians are linked in new ways.

Political scientists often talk about party-citizen “linkages” -- the ways parties maintain effective bonds with their supporters. Twentieth century parties followed a wide variety of models: some used clientelism, or material benefits and vote buying; some relied on effective ties to organized groups such as labor unions; yet others concentrated on policy-related appeals that they communicated to voters via advertising and mass media.

But in the past decade, parties and politicians have acquired a transformative new tool: social media. Individual politicians can speak directly to potential supporters, unfiltered by traditional media or by party leaders who would like to choose which politicians get the microphone.

As a consequence, politics has become less predictable. Take Brazil’s 2018 presidential election that led to the election of the far-rightist Jair Bolsonaro. Unable to find a major party to sponsor him, Bolsonaro ran under the banner of the very small Social Liberal Party. He was severely disadvantaged in resources for traditional advertising or TV time.

Yet Bolsonaro compensated through skillful use of social media. When he was stabbed three weeks prior to the first-round election and hospital bound, he took to YouTube and WhatsApp to communicate directly with supporters. Though Bolsonaro skipped most of the televised debates, he effectively teleconferenced into rallies from his smartphone.

Social media organizing via platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube has also created a new cadre of activists in Brazil. “Influencers” can mediate between candidates and voters, and sometimes they themselves choose to run for office.

Yet other “new” types of linkages are very old. In Brazil, churches have increasingly served as important sites for discussing and supporting candidates, as evangelicalism has expanded and become increasingly politically active.

Finally, democracies are constantly experimenting with institutions. They change primary rules. They institute procedures for referendums, petitions, or recall elections. They create new forums for participatory democracy, and abolish others. Each change creates opportunities for strategic parties to find new ways of interacting with potential supporters.

So many questions remain -- I’ll mention just one. Are some types of linkages more conducive to democracy than others? Political scientists argue that when clientelistic linkages prevail, representation of citizens policy interests suffers.

What about social media? A new and burgeoning literature suggests that social media politics favors populist and conservative causes. The consequences for democracy remain to be seen.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#13415 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 11:33

From Jennifer Salazi's review of Kochland by business journalist Christopher Leonard at NYT:

Quote

Leonard races over the company’s founding in Wichita, Kan., by Fred Sr. in 1940, in order to arrive at the book’s real beginning: 1967, when the paterfamilias suddenly died on a duck-hunting trip and the 32-year-old Charles took over. Charles used the next several decades to transform the energy company that made his father a mere multimillionaire into the behemoth it is today. Fossil fuels, commodities trading, chemicals, paper products, fertilizer: Koch Industries has inserted itself into nearly every aspect of daily life, raking in billions along the way.

As the company grew, Charles Koch developed a corporate philosophy to ensure that its various divisions could focus on their ultimate purpose: to generate profits. He settled on a name for his vision, a set of rules that he codified in a pamphlet for employees and later enshrined in a book. That name — Market-Based Management — didn’t sound all that imaginative, but then neither did the theory itself, which boiled down to treating employees like entrepreneurs and exposing them to market discipline.

For a while, this entrepreneurial risk-taking resulted in a slew of criminal charges and complaints. Leonard recounts the company’s most ignominious hits, including a Senate investigation into whether it had been stealing oil from Native American tribal land. (Charles Koch said the company “got more money than we paid for oil,” but insisted it was only because his employees had mismeasured the oil they took — which they happened to do consistently in the company’s favor.) In 1999, Koch Industries pleaded guilty to dumping contaminated wastewater near its Pine Bend refinery in Minnesota.

The company learned that violating regulations could put a dent in its profit margins, and responded accordingly. It now imprints upon employees the need for “10,000 percent compliance”: obeying 100 percent of the laws 100 percent of the time. But it has also looked for ways to transform the regulatory regime — hence the vociferous lobbying by a division blandly called Koch Companies Public Sector and the “dark money” chronicled in Mayer’s book.

Since the election of Donald Trump, who was the only Republican presidential candidate that the Kochs refused to support, the company has pursued a strategy that Leonard helpfully calls “block-and-tackle”: Block Trump when he tries anything anathema to the company’s interest, and help him tackle the things that Koch wants — deregulation, tax cuts, conservative judicial appointments. Charles Koch has apparently learned to treat the Trump presidency like a natural disaster: an eruption of volatility to prepare for and exploit.

But it’s Leonard’s depictions of Market-Based Management in action that are most illuminating here, and the light they give off is chilling. “Kochland” includes a chapter on warehouse operations that tracked workers’ activity down to the minute (each conversation and bathroom trip had to be accounted for) and posted their performance rankings on a bulletin board. It was an antiseptic, ruthless system that pitted the workers against one another. They were unionized, but they felt so exhausted and degraded at the end of the work day that any solidarity began to fade — to the detriment of their negotiating power and to the benefit of the company’s bottom line.

In his book “The Science of Success,” Charles Koch calls Market-Based Management “a way for business to create a harmony of interest with society.” The question “Kochland” raises is whether this “harmony of interest” results in a place where anyone without a few billion to spare would actually want to live.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#13416 User is offline   Winstonm 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 12:11

A prophylactic to prevent the spread of Trumpnista's "public charge" disease:


Quote

Q. What is a public charge and when does it apply?
A. For purposes of determining inadmissibility, “public charge” means an individual who is likely to become primarily dependent on the government for subsistence, as demonstrated by either the receipt of public cash assistance for income maintenance or institutionalization for long-term care at government expense.
my emphasis

I am shocked, shocked to find that food stamps do not fall under either criteria. ;)
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
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#13417 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 14:59

From Nicholas Kulish and Mike McIntire at NYT:

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She was an heiress without a cause — an indifferent student, an unhappy young bride, a miscast socialite. Her most enduring passion was for birds.

But Cordelia Scaife May eventually found her life’s purpose: curbing what she perceived as the lethal threat of overpopulation by trying to shut America’s doors to immigrants.

She believed that the United States was “being invaded on all fronts” by foreigners, who “breed like hamsters” and exhaust natural resources. She thought that the border with Mexico should be sealed and that abortions on demand would contain the swelling masses in developing countries.

An heiress to the Mellon banking and industrial fortune with a half-billion dollars at her disposal, Mrs. May helped create what would become the modern anti-immigration movement. She bankrolled the founding and operation of the nation’s three largest restrictionist groups — the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies — as well as dozens of smaller ones, including some that have promulgated white nationalist views.

Today, 14 years after Mrs. May’s death, her money remains the lifeblood of the movement, through her Colcom Foundation. It has poured $180 million into a network of groups that spent decades agitating for policies now pursued by President Trump: militarizing the border, capping legal immigration, prioritizing skills over family ties for entry and reducing access to public benefits for migrants, as in the new rule issued just this week by the administration.

If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#13418 User is online   johnu 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 15:32

--- Moved from Official BBO Hijacked Thread Thread ---

Trump Defends Retweet Of Baseless Conspiracy Theory Implicating Clintons In Epstein’s Death

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President Donald Trump is defending his retweets of baseless conspiracy theories attempting to link Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent suicide with former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Speaking with reporters in Morristown, New Jersey, on Tuesday, Trump said he thought it was “fine” to retweet the conspiracy because it came from “a very highly respected conservative pundit.”

So the Unindicted Co-Conspirator in Chief is trying to deflect attention from himself. Dennison is on record as admiring the success of Epstein with "very" young women and was known to have "partied" with Epstein on more than one occasion. What does he have to worry about?

If there is any conspiracy to investigate, Individual-1 is in charge of the entire government, his government paid personal attorney Barr is in charge of the prison where Epstein was being held and who was recused from the Epstein case because he worked at a law firm that previously defended Epstein, unrecused himself to take over the investigation into the death of Epstein. I'm sure he will do an even better job at finding the "facts" than he did in the Mueller report :rolleyes: There have been too many scandals and unethical activities in the White House to keep track of since 2018, but this has a stink to it that probably will never go away.
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#13419 User is online   johnu 

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Posted 2019-August-14, 15:40

Steve King under fire for questioning if humanity would exist without 'rape and incest'

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King, who was speaking at an event in Urbandale, Iowa, was intending to make the case for a GOP policy that bans nearly all abortions, including in cases when the woman is a victim of rape or incest.

"What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled out anyone who was a product of rape or incest? Would there be any population of the world left if we did that?" King said, according to the Des Moines Register, which first reported the comments.

"Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages that happened throughout all these different nations, I know that I can't say that I was not a part of a product of that,” King continued.

The headline of this article is misleading when it says King has come under fire for his comments. Practically all of the politicians condemning his words are Democrats. Republicans are having a blaring silence about King. Maybe they think he is acting as a spokesman for the Molester in Chief so they aren't allowed to disagree with his words.
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#13420 User is offline   barmar 

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Posted 2019-August-15, 04:02

View Postjohnu, on 2019-August-14, 15:40, said:


8% of men in the region of the former Mongol empire are believed by geneticists to be direct descendants of Genghis Khan. So much of humanity also wouldn't exist without polygamy -- is he advocating that as well?

And America was built on the backs of slave laborers. It was wrong, but we probably wouldn't be here now if we hadn't done it.

I know that many people are nostalgic for the good old days of the '50's. I just didn't realize it was the 1650's.

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