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  • Re: Trump to win?

    i can't think of any presidents in the last 100 years who were even slightly left except for fdr and lbj.

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    • Re: Trump to win?

      Originally posted by jk View Post
      i can't think of any presidents in the last 100 years who were even slightly left except for fdr and lbj.
      Jimmy Carter?

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      • Re: Trump to win?

        Originally posted by ProdigyofZen View Post
        Jimmy Carter?
        can't recall much that he got done. maybe i'm forgetting something.

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        • Re: Trump to win?

          Originally posted by jk View Post
          i can't think of any presidents in the last 100 years who were even slightly left except for fdr and lbj.
          So true. For all the flak "socialism" gets, I can't even remember if it's ever actually been attempted. Hollow and corrupt leaders who destroyed whole countries under the guise of socialism have been labelled as it's champions. And now that dear capitalism has led to exact same result, I guess we have run out of models to debate.

          That article was so well written and heartbreaking. And yet when you compare people who have the luxury of injecting themselves with opiates to a six year old girl fighting stray dogs for food scraps in a garbage dump in India, you get some sense of perspective. Yes that too is reality.
          It's the Debt, stupid!!

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          • Re: Trump to win?

            Scott Adams finds Hillary tweet that actually seems pro Trump! Her campaign is a mess.




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            • Re: Trump to win?

              getting paid?

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              • Re: Trump to win?

                getting paid?
                or: 'rhymes with' ?
                Did The Clinton Foundation Give $2 Million To Bill's "Energizer" Mistress?

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                • Re: Trump to win?

                  Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected

                  Why political professionals are struggling to make sense of the world they created.


                  ENLARGE
                  Donald Trump supporters at a Nevada caucus, Feb. 23. PHOTO: ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES





                  By PEGGY NOONAN

                  2204 COMMENTS

                  We’re in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact of the Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump, they say.
                  I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?
                  In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.
                  But actually that’s been true for a while, and is how we got in the position we’re in.
                  Last October I wrote of the five stages of Trump, based on the Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Most of the professionals I know are stuck somewhere between four and five.


                  But I keep thinking of how Donald Trump got to be the very likely Republican nominee. There are many answers and reasons, but my thoughts keep revolving around the idea of protection. It is a theme that has been something of a preoccupation in this space over the years, but I think I am seeing it now grow into an overall political dynamic throughout the West.
                  There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.
                  The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.
                  I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.
                  They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.
                  Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.
                  One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and Western Europe is immigration. It is the issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.
                  It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump.
                  Britain will probably leave the European Union over it. In truth immigration is one front in that battle, but it is the most salient because of the European refugee crisis and the failure of the protected class to address it realistically and in a way that offers safety to the unprotected.
                  If you are an unprotected American—one with limited resources and negligible access to power—you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.
                  Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration—its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine—more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.
                  It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.
                  The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment—another word for the protected—nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.
                  Mr. Trump came from that.
                  Similarly in Europe, citizens on the ground in member nations came to see the EU apparatus as a racket—an elite that operated in splendid isolation, looking after its own while looking down on the people.
                  In Germany the incident that tipped public opinion against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal refugee policy happened on New Year’s Eve in the public square of Cologne. Packs of men said to be recent migrants groped and molested groups of young women. It was called a clash of cultures, and it was that, but it was also wholly predictable if any policy maker had cared to think about it. And it was not the protected who were the victims—not a daughter of EU officials or members of the Bundestag. It was middle- and working-class girls—the unprotected, who didn’t even immediately protest what had happened to them. They must have understood that in the general scheme of things they’re nobodies.
                  What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate but because they’re better.
                  You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement—charter schools, choice, etc.—because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.
                  This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.
                  And a country really can’t continue this way.
                  In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That’s more or less how America used to be. There didn’t seem to be so much distance between the top and the bottom.
                  Now is seems the attitude of the top half is: You’re on your own. Get with the program, little racist.
                  Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize. Maybe it is the overclass that must re-moralize.
                  I don’t know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.



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                  • Re: Trump to win?

                    http://ggc-mauldin-images.s3.amazona...60514_TFTF.pdf

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                    • Re: Trump to win?

                      Mauldin is a dud. It would be nice to know what percent of his money he has lost betting against the US government and Wall Street. Thank goodness for speaking fees. It’s funny he brings up NC bathroom legislation without mentioning the real thrust of it…prohibiting municipalities from establishing minimum wages.

                      Noonan uses the wrong pronoun…

                      “Maybe it is the overclass that must re-moralize. I don’t know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.”

                      Change “their” to “our.” Who is she kidding?

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                      • Re: Trump to win?

                        Originally posted by jk View Post
                        what do you think happened?...it seems like the turning point was after carter was elected, and lewis powell wrote his famous memo.

                        Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
                        Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
                        Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
                        Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
                        -- Epicurus

                        The Powell Memorandum is an important temporal marker of decline, no doubt. And we've spoken of it here several times past.

                        In terms labor unions, I believe the decision to move manufacturing overseas had as much to do with profit as eliminating labor unions as a center of independent opposition to oligarchical power. No manufacturing = no unions and those unions that were permitted to thrive serve as whipping boys corporate elites can point to as "useless," "lazy", "uncompetitive", what have you. Folks of a certain age recall how quickly public opinion was made to shift on the value and necessity of a strong labor movement and effective unions. In the springtime they were critical components of the political economy and by the fall they were anathema.

                        I believe the turning point; the moment where society suffers a dramatic reversal in political direction began on November 22, 1963. It's my opinion that at that instance, the oligarchy - hailing mostly in the west (with elements straddling the Eastern Establishment) seized political control of this country. At that moment the America whose Constitution could be trashed with impunity by elected officials was born. Henceforward no president would dare challenge what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex" and by 2007 the president would have virtually no independent power at all, enjoying only the power to further the interests of the oligarchy. The owners of the country would see their overseers installed in executive office and all meaningful policies from that point were dictated by the ambitions and needs of oligarchy. Congress too would have no independent power, and the courts would be subverted to endorse the set of policies that the executive, a President in name only, was enacting on behalf of those who own and operate the enterprise known as the United States of America.



                        Our Republic had been mortally wounded with an oligarchy established in its place.

                        The travail of LBJ is instructive. We're fortunate to have access to the Johnson Presidential tapes which have been made available on the Internet by the UVA's Miller Center for Public Affairs and after listening to them for a while one begins to see a paradox. After striving for "ultimate power" for decades through fair means and foul, once installed as the accidental president LBJ begins to discover how little power he has over his presidency. Rather than define his presidency by civil rights and the Great Society, Johnson discovers that it is Vietnam that will determine how history judges him, a war in which he has no interest whatsoever, yet is obliged to pursue. In all those tapes, there is never any question about that; Johnson never considers deviating from the plan. Nixon, too.



                        Vietnam (and our modern sandbox debacles) reveal why the left-liberal elements of America represented in the perspective of the Eastern establishment and the New Frontier stood in the way of the America of preemptive war we are living today.

                        I've referenced Carl Ogelsby's epic "Yankee and Cowboy War" in the past and to date I've found no other source that so effectively outlines the conflict between the rapacious forces of industrial and militaristic oligarchy and the seemingly less aggressive Eastern banking interests and nothing I could write here would do it justice. While no longer in print, it is still available for sale and at various places on the Internet for anyone to make their own judgement on its descriptive and predictive value.

                        Now I understand all too clearly that such assertions and opinions are subject to ridicule and dismissal. I understand that anyone who makes these assertions and expresses these opinions will be dismissed as mentally unsound. I've lost count how many times my sanity has been questioned by the self-described "coalfaces" among us. Frankly, I've grown to rely on that and I appreciate now what a great comfort it is and the freedom of thought and expression it provides.

                        So yes, with these assertions and opinions, know all that I am as nutty as a fruitcake, with a madness surpassed only by those who would listen to me. And I am in great company. Just look what other madmen are asserting now:

                        Welcome to 1984

                        By Chris Hedges

                        The artifice of corporate totalitarianism has been exposed. The citizens, disgusted by the lies and manipulation, have turned on the political establishment. But the game is not over. Corporate power has within its arsenal potent forms of control. It will use them. As the pretense of democracy is unmasked, the naked fist of state repression takes its place. America is about—unless we act quickly—to get ugly.

                        “Our political system is decaying,” said Ralph Nader when I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C. “It’s on the way to gangrene. It’s reaching a critical mass of citizen revolt.”

                        This moment in American history is what Antonio Gramsci called the “interregnum”—the period when a discredited regime is collapsing but a new one has yet to take its place. There is no guarantee that what comes next will be better. But this space, which will close soon, offers citizens the final chance to embrace a new vision and a new direction.

                        This vision will only be obtained through mass acts of civic mobilization and civil disobedience across the country. Nader, who sees this period in American history as crucial, perhaps the last opportunity to save us from tyranny, is planning to rally the left for three days, from May 23 to May 26 at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., in what he is calling “Breaking Through Power” or “Citizen’s Revolutionary Week.” He is bringing to the capital scores of activists and community leaders to speak, organize and attempt to mobilize to halt our slide into despotism.

                        “The two parties can implode politically,” Nader said. “They can be divided by different candidates and super PACs. But this doesn’t implode their paymasters.”

                        “Elections have become off-limits to democracy,” he went on. “They have become off-limits to democracy’s fundamental civil community or civil society. When that happens, the very roots shrivel and dry up. Politics is now a sideshow. Politics does not bother corporate power. Whoever wins, they win. Both parties represent Wall Street over Main Street. Wall Street is embedded in the federal government.”

                        Donald Trump, like Hillary Clinton, has no plans to disrupt the corporate machinery, although Wall Street has rallied around Clinton because of her predictability and long service to the financial and military elites. What Trump has done, Nader points out, is channel “the racist, right-wing militants” within the electorate, embodied in large part by the white working poor, into the election process, perhaps for one last time.

                        Much of the left, Nader argues, especially with the Democratic Party’s blatant rigging of the primaries to deny Bernie Sanders the nomination, grasps that change will come only by building mass movements. This gives the left, at least until these protofascist forces also give up on the political process, a window of opportunity. If we do not seize it, he warns, we may be doomed.

                        He despairs over the collapse of the commercial media, now governed by the primacy of corporate profit.

                        “Trump’s campaign has enormous appeal to the commercial mass media,” Nader said. “He brought huge ratings during the debates. He taunted the networks. He said, ‘I’m boycotting this debate. It’s going to cost you profit.’ Has this ever happened before in American history? It shows you the decay, the commercialization of public elections.”

                        The impoverished national discourse, fostered by a commercial mass media that does not see serious political debate as profitable and focuses on the trivial, the salacious and the inane, has empowered showmen and con artists such as Trump.

                        “Trump speaks in a very plain language, at the third-grade level, according to some linguists,” Nader said. “He speaks like a father figure. He says, ‘I’ll get you jobs. I’ll bring back industry. I’ll bring back manufacturing. I’ll protect you from immigrants.’ The media never challenges him. He is not asked, ‘How are we going do all of this? What is step one? Step two? Is the White House going to ignore the Congress and the courts?’ He astonishes his audience. He amazes them with his bullying, his lying, his insults, like ‘Little Marco,’ the wall Mexico is going to pay for, no more entry in the country by Muslims—a quarter of the human race—until we figure it out. The media never catches up with him. He is always on the offensive. He is always news. The commercial media wants the circus. It gives them high ratings and high profit.”

                        The focus on info-entertainment has left not only left the public uninformed and easily manipulated but has locked out the voices that advocate genuine reform and change.

                        “The commercial media does not have time for citizen groups and citizen leaders who are really trying to make America great, whether by advancing health safety or economic well-being,” Nader bemoaned. “These groups are overwhelmed. They’re marginalized. They’re kept from nourishing the contents of national, state and local elections. Look at the Sunday news shows. No one can get on to demonstrate that the majority of the people want full Medicare for all with the free choice of doctors and hospitals, not only more efficient but more life-saving. There was a major press conference a few days ago at the National Press Club. The leading advocates of full Medicare for all, or single-payer, were there, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. Sidney Wolfe, the heads of Physicians for a National Health Program. This is a group with about 15,000 physicians on board. Nobody came. There was a stringer for an indie media outlet and the corporate crime reporter. There are all kinds of major demonstrations, 1,300 arrests outside the Congress protesting the corruption of money in politics. Again no coverage, except a little on NPR and on ‘Democracy Now!’ ”

                        “The system is gamed,” he said. “The only way out of it is to mobilize the civil society.

                        http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2..._1984_20160514
                        Last edited by Woodsman; May 15, 2016, 08:22 AM.

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                        • Re: Trump to win?

                          i bought, but have yet to read, david talbot's book, and i just ordered yankee and cowboy. however, i feel myself resisting my own interest.

                          i am open to considering the possibilities you describe. i was interested in james jesus angleton many years ago, and read "a wilderness of mirrors" about the great mole hunt among other things. that was a just a side track from my interest in soviet studies. and many, many years ago i read some books about andrew mellon, which included information about the u.s.' role in getting panama to break off from columbia. as a kid i recall listening to interviews of mark lane.

                          but i'm not sure i want to go down this rabbit hole. it reminds me a bit of when i read catherine austen fitts' description of her experiences in and with gov't. i experienced a gravitational tug into a paranoid worldview, but also knew that the fact that it was paranoid didn't necessarily mean it wasn't true.

                          i just wasn't sure how i would benefit from involving myself more in this view and this knowledge. i don't think i'm just taking the blue pill. i'm aware of the actors and processes you refer to, but don't make that awareness a big part of my consciousness or my life.

                          you, woodsman, seem to have immersed yourself in these matters. [or at least it's immersed compared to me.] how do you think this focus, this knowledge and this way of seeing has affected you and your life?

                          i realize i'm asking a fairly personal question in this, a public forum. if you are open to discussing this at all, perhaps we should switch to pm. but either channel, i'm very interested in this question. perhaps it relates to a question i asked you earlier [in this or some other thread - i figure you knew i was quoting lenin]: what is to be done?

                          i read that hedges piece yesterday, i think, but wasn't very convinced that his call for "mobilization" was worth its weight in the electrons and light beams required to deliver it to my computer. that may be his answer to "what is to be done?", but i am quite skeptical that it is an effective answer.
                          Last edited by jk; May 15, 2016, 11:03 AM.

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                          • Re: Trump to win?

                            From where I'm standing, the right looks utterly victorious and that in my opinion accounts for just about everything that's been made to turn to shit in the last 50 years.

                            With all due respect, those of us on "the right" wonder WTF you are talking about? The left's long march through the institutions has been incredibly successful in fundamentally transforming the United States.
                            Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -Groucho

                            Comment


                            • Re: Trump to win?

                              Originally posted by Master Shake View Post
                              With all due respect, those of us on "the right" wonder WTF you are talking about? The left's long march through the institutions has been incredibly successful in fundamentally transforming the United States.
                              I have made an attempt across several posts to answer that question, Shakes. It might well be said that my entire tenure with you good people at iTulip represents an attempt to answer your WTF, generally.

                              And so now I think the onus is on you to support your thesis as I have attempted to support mine. I'd like you to tell us your perspective on such questions as...

                              What is the left?
                              How does the left differ from the right?
                              What characterized the United States before it was transformed?
                              What was fundamental about the United States prior to this transformation?
                              How did that transformation come about?
                              What characterizes the United States now that the transformation is complete?
                              What is fundamental about the United States now subsequent to this transformation?

                              Those are a starting point, anyway. Unless you are prepared to answer those with at least the same degree of rigor I presented my viewpoint, I don't believe anything I might add to what I've already written would mean very much to you.

                              I think I'd rather wait to read your perspective and ideas on how the present crisis came to pass before I offer any more opinions of my own.

                              Comment


                              • Re: Trump to win?

                                Originally posted by Master Shake View Post
                                From where I'm standing, the right looks utterly victorious and that in my opinion accounts for just about everything that's been made to turn to shit in the last 50 years.

                                With all due respect, those of us on "the right" wonder WTF you are talking about? The left's long march through the institutions has been incredibly successful in fundamentally transforming the United States.
                                i think joe queenan summed it up pretty well, albeit some of his references are dated:

                                The way our society works is this. Leftist intellectuals with harebrained Marxist ideas get to control Stanford, M.I.T., Yale and the American studies department at the University of Vermont. In return the right gets I.B.M., D.E.C., Honeywell, Disney World and the New York Stock Exchange. Leftist academics get to try out their stupid ideas on impressionable youths between 17 and 21 who don't have any money or power. The right gets to try out its ideas on North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and parts of Africa, most of which take Mastercard. The left gets Harvard, Oberlin, Twyla Tharp's dance company and Madison, Wisconsin. The right gets Nasdaq, Boeing, General Motors, Apple, McDonnell Douglas, Washington, D.C., Citicorp, Texas, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Japan and outer space. This seems like a fair arrangement.


                                update it a bit and the left gets same sex marriage, the right gets what's revealed in the panama papers. the left gets genderless bathrooms, the right gets a society in which the upper 0.1% own as much as 90% of the population. the left gets to argue about its iphone encryption, the right gets the phone records of every person in the country. as queenan says, "this seems like a fair arrangement."
                                Last edited by jk; May 15, 2016, 04:44 PM.

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