Trump to win?

[vt]

Re: Trump to win?

Assange releasing Wikileaks Clinton material at 3 A.M. Eastern U.S. He will be appearing in a video broadcast in Berlin.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016...ouncement.html

It should be an interesting morning on the U.S. morning news.

[Ellen Z]

Re: Trump to win?

So, if you think that the upper end of the income spectrum should get greater tax cuts, thereby creating more capital for investment that will create jobs and raise up the lower classes, then you will support Trump.
If you think that taxes at the upper end should be raised so as to fund government investment in infrastructure or some other federal programs, then you will support Clinton.

Quite a few newspapers that historically support Republican candidates have come out against Trump. They do not think "that taxes at the upper end should be raised so as to fund government
investment in infrastructure or some other federal programs." They do think the risk of Trump sitting in the oval office, making off-the-cuff, irrational decisions, is so great that it’s more important than his policy positions.

Here are samples, with links to the full editorials:

Dallas Morning News
_____ There is only one serious candidate on the presidential ballot in November. We recommend Hillary Clinton.
_____ We don't come to this decision easily. This newspaper has not recommended a Democrat for the nation's highest office since before World War II — if you're counting, that's more than 75 years and nearly 20 elections. The party's over-reliance on government and regulation to remedy the country's ills is at odds with our belief in private-sector ingenuity and innovation. Our values are more about individual liberty, free markets and a strong national defense.
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/ed...-no-republican
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/ed...n-us-president
　
USA TODAY
____ The Editorial Board has never taken sides in the presidential race. We're doing it now.
____ In the 34-year history of USA TODAY, the Editorial Board has never taken sides in the presidential race.... This year, the choice isn’t between two capable major party nominees who happen to have significant ideological differences. This year, one of the candidates — Republican nominee Donald Trump — is, by unanimous consensus of the Editorial Board, unfit for the presidency....Trump has demonstrated repeatedly that he lacks the temperament, knowledge, steadiness and honesty that America needs from its presidents.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinio...18359dded681eb

San Diego Union-Tribune
_____ Despite constant counsel from GOP advisors and insiders to adopt a decorous public persona, Trump continues to lash out at critics, to insist complex problems can be solved with little effort and to depict an America that’s been "ripped off by every single country in the world," as he said in this week’s debate....Upon inauguration on Jan. 20, he would be in charge of the executive branch of a global superpower and possess enormous authority, operating with no coherent worldview besides "I alone can fix it." ....We could see an administration that reneges on its treaty commitments to dozens of nations...We could see an administration that ruins U.S. trustworthiness in international finance by seeking to refinance terms with debt-holders
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/...-conversation/

Houston Chronicle
The Chronicle editorial page does not typically endorse early in an election cycle; we prefer waiting for the campaign to play out and for issues to emerge and be addressed. We make an exception in the 2016 presidential race, because the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is not merely political. It is something much more basic than party preference....Any one of Trump's less-than-sterling qualities - his erratic temperament, his dodgy business practices, his racism, his Putin-like strongman inclinations and faux-populist demagoguery, his contempt for the rule of law, his ignorance - is enough to be disqualifying.
http://www.chron.com/opinion/recomme...on-8650345.php

There are more. Here are links to a couple of summaries:
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-ed...nap-story.html
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/...rump/91466954/

[santafe2]

Re: Trump to win?

Quite a few newspapers that historically support Republican candidates have come out against Trump.

And I'll add my personal favorite, the Arizona Republic which has not supported a Dem in it's 126 year history. Some of the right wing intellectuals supporting Trump have sent death threats to the editorial board.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Trump to win?

This might be a good time to post some old(but highly relevant) data from 2010 US mid term elections and the powerful impact of social media:

A 2012 study published in the journal Nature, “A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization,” tested the idea that voting behavior can be significantly influenced by messages on Facebook. On Election Day 2010 — the Congressional midterms — 60,055,176 Facebook users were shown messages at the top of their news feeds that encouraged them to vote, pointed to nearby polling places, offered a place to click “I Voted” and displayed images of select friends who had already voted (the “social message”). Two smaller groups — each about 600,000 people — were given either voting-encouragement messages but no data about friends’ behavior (an “informational message”) or were not given any voting-related messages.
The researchers, from the University of California, San Diego, and Facebook, also were able to analyze the voting behavior of approximately 6.3 million subjects using publicly available records. For the study’s purposes, close friends were defined by the frequency of online interactions and were assumed to be more likely to have face-to-face interactions. The researchers involved were Robert M. Bond, Christopher J. Fariss, Jason J. Jones, Adam D. I. Kramer, Cameron Marlow, Jaime E. Settle and James H. Fowler, the corresponding author.
The study’s findings include:

• The data “suggest that the Facebook social message increased turnout directly by about 60,000 voters and indirectly through social contagion by another 280,000 voters, for a total of 340,000 additional votes.”
• Strong ties between friends proved much more influential than weak ties: “Close friends exerted about four times more influence on the total number of validated voters mobilized than the message itself…. Online mobilization works because it primarily spreads through strong-tie networks that probably exist offline but have an online representation.”
• “To put these results in context, it is important to note that turnout has been steadily increasing in recent U.S. midterm elections, from 36.3% of the voting-age population in 2002 to 37.2% in 2006, and to 37.8% in 2010.” The 340,000 additional votes attributed to Facebook messages represents “0.14% of the voting age population of about 236 million in 2010…. It is possible that more of the 0.60% growth in turnout between 2006 and 2010 might have been caused by a single message on Facebook.”

The researchers conclude the study has a number of implications: “First and foremost, online political mobilization works. It induces political self-expression, but it also induces information gathering and real, validated voter turnout. Although previous research suggested that online messages do not work, it is possible that conventional sample sizes may not be large enough to detect the modest effect sizes shown here. We also show that social mobilization in online networks is significantly more effective than informational mobilization alone. Showing familiar faces to users can dramatically improve the effectiveness of a mobilization message.”

http://journalistsresource.org/studi...l-mobilization

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It really does beg the question WHY have mid term election results been slowly rising?

How much of a factor does Social Media play into it?

Then the question is how much additional political voting behaviour experimentation and/or operational execution has been conducted?

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Risk of digital gerrymandering(or maybe better described as psychosocial political influence machines):

https://newrepublic.com/article/1178...gerrymandering

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I wonder if a non-partisan political campaign version of the Congressional Budget Office would be of benefit to monitor any malignant behaviour?

Otherwise, hopefully the hacktivist community will either bring light to the darkness or focus on making Google/Facebook as irrelevant as Microsoft a bit sooner.

Sadly, both Facebook and Google have learned from Microsoft's hubris, arrogance, and naïveté.

Google and Facebook are both very active participants in the special interest finance game.

The idea of mass personalised Asche conformity experiments to shape voter behaviour is more than a bit unsettling.

Lots of folks waking up to how important the next President will be in packing and shaping the Supreme Court for an entire generation.

But I wonder if neutering malignant political leveraging of social influence(such as anonymising social media political voting influence instead of the potential for "82 of your friends already voted today for Hillary") might be an area for carefully created and limited regulation.

I'm imagining a mashup of Boss Tweed's political machine with a malignant invisible hand of Adam Smith, narrated by Harrison Ford in dystopic, near future Bladerunner, USA.

[Milton Kuo]

Re: Trump to win?

This might be a good time to post some old(but highly relevant) data from 2010 US mid term elections and the powerful impact of social media:

...

The idea of mass personalised Asche conformity experiments to shape voter behaviour is more than a bit unsettling.

Lots of folks waking up to how important the next President will be in packing and shaping the Supreme Court for an entire generation.

But I wonder if neutering malignant political leveraging of social influence(such as anonymising social media political voting influence instead of the potential for "82 of your friends already voted today for Hillary") might be an area for carefully created and limited regulation.

I think it's already too late for that. The massive M&A activity in media companies has resulted in an echo chamber when it comes to news reporting, which appears more and more biased every day and not only when it comes to pure politics. Consider the wasteland that is the financial news media.

And now it seems that Dilbert creator Scott Adams has been targeted by media groups that do not like his opinions.

http://blog.dilbert.com/post/1513015...ecame-a-target

Adams' blog posting brings up an interesting idea on how to derail Trump: ban him from Twitter. Trump's ability to spend as little as he has on his campaign so far relative to HRC is due in large part to his getting free publicity through Twitter and follow-up media stories. Force him to pay money for media coverage and you effectively duct tape his mouth shut.

[lektrode]

Re: Trump to win?

And I'll add my personal favorite, the Arizona Republic which has not supported a Dem in it's 126 year history. Some of the right wing intellectuals supporting Trump have sent death threats to the editorial board.

well.. what else WOULD we expect from 'the establishment+status quo' and their propaganda machine?

we've already seen the lengths to which they will go, the depths - of depravity - to which they will plumb in an all-out WAR AGAINST WE, THE PEOPLE to protect 'their empire' aka the FSA: the Fascist State of amerika

and you've illustrated it purrrrfectly santa.

[lektrode]

Re: Trump to win?

this just in:

maybe the syphillis (or whatever is making him look, like.. all of a sudden 'kinda gaunt', during the demconventn) is creeping into his (big) head now?

Bill Clinton Bashes Obamacare As The "Craziest Thing In The World"

"You’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care... the people getting killed in this deal are the small-business people."

• Oct 4, 2016 12:05 PM

WHOOOO baybee!
guess this means the 'rumors' that team C and Team O 'dont even like each other' are true, eh?
(cant imagine why, i mean.. just because teddy k &co stabbed the hillbilly show in the back in 2008...)

also looks like wikileaks isnt going to be the only one 'spillin the beans' this week...

In a staggering moment of honesty caught on tape, former President Bill Clinton admits to a group of voters in Michigan that Obamacare is a complete disaster and is wreaking havoc on the middle-class and "small-business people." Per the video published by the NY Post, Clinton says that Obamacare is fine for those who are eligible for subsidies but admits that that hardworking "people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half and it’s the craziest thing in the world."

“You’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care, and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half and it’s the craziest thing in the world.

On the other hand, the current system works fine if you’re eligible for Medicaid, if you’re a lower-income working person. If you’re already on Medicare or if you get enough subsidies on a modest income that you can afford your health care.

But the people getting killed in this deal are the small-business people and individuals who make just a little bit too much to get any of these subsidies."




Per The Hill, the comments from Bill come at an awkward time as Obama is set to deliver a "major speech" in Florida touting the astounding success of ObamaCare. Moreover, the comments seemingly contradict Hillary on the issue as she has largely embraced Obamacare on the campaign trail while suggesting that small modifications may be needed to "fix" certain components of the legislation.

If you listen to the madness long enough, every once in a while the talking heads will slip and actually speak the truth. Though, as always, we're sure Bill will be pulled off the campaign trail, in short order, and reprimanded for his moment of honesty before being re-released into the wild with new talking points singing the praises of Obamacare's many "achievements."

[santafe2]

Re: Trump to win?

...and you've illustrated it purrrrfectly santa.

You're welcome lek. I'll be sure to keep it up.

[lektrode]

Re: Trump to win?

You're welcome lek. I'll be sure to keep it up.

oh, i'm quite certain you will santa...

too bad for you and the rest of the so-called 'elite' that
so will chuck: (and, thankfully, so will woody)

When Did Our Elites Become Self-Serving Parasites?

The moral bankruptcy of our financial and political elites is self-evident. Combine financialization, neoliberalism and moral bankruptcy, and you end up with self-serving parasitic elites.

• Oct 4, 2016 12:51 PM

couldn'tve said it better myself (not bad for a guy who calls hilo home, either, i'd add ;)

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Combine financialization, neoliberalism and moral bankruptcy, and you end up with self-serving parasitic elites.
When did our financial and political elites become self-serving parasites? Some will answer that elites have always been self-serving parasites; as tempting as it may be to offer a blanket denunciation of elites, this overlooks the eras in which elites rose to meet existential crises.
Following in Ancient Rome's Footsteps: Moral Decay, Rising Wealth Inequality(September 30, 2015)
As historian Peter Turchin explained in his book War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, the value of sacrifice was a core characteristic of the early Republic's elite:

"Unlike the selfish elites of the later periods, the aristocracy of the early Republic did not spare its blood or treasure in the service of the common interest. When 50,000 Romans, a staggering one fifth of Rome’s total manpower, perished in the battle of Cannae, as mentioned previously, the senate lost almost one third of its membership. This suggests that the senatorial aristocracy was more likely to be killed in wars than the average citizen….

The wealthy classes were also the first to volunteer extra taxes when they were needed… A graduated scale was used in which the senators paid the most, followed by the knights, and then other citizens. In addition, officers and centurions (but not common soldiers!) served without pay, saving the state 20 percent of the legion’s payroll.

The richest 1 percent of the Romans during the early Republic was only 10 to 20 times as wealthy as an average Roman citizen."

Now compare that to the situation in Late Antiquity Rome when

"an average Roman noble of senatorial class had property valued in the neighborhood of 20,000 Roman pounds of gold. There was no “middle class” comparable to the small landholders of the third century B.C.; the huge majority of the population was made up of landless peasants working land that belonged to nobles. These peasants had hardly any property at all, but if we estimate it (very generously) at one tenth of a pound of gold, the wealth differential would be 200,000! Inequality grew both as a result of the rich getting richer (late imperial senators were 100 times wealthier than their Republican predecessors) and those of the middling wealth becoming poor."

Do you see any similarities with the present-day realities depicted in these charts?



Correspondent Jim B. summarized historian Arnold Toynbee's study of the rise and fall of civilizations: "Civilizations fail when their elites change from an admired dynamic creative class to a despised Establishment of corrupt rentiers, an entrenched governing class unfit to govern."
I would trace the slide into self-serving parasites to three dynamics: financialization, neoliberalism and moral bankruptcy. While definitions of financialization vary, mine is:

Financialization is the mass commodification of debt and debt-based financial instruments collaterized by previously low-risk assets, a pyramiding of risk and speculative gains that is only possible in a massive expansion of low-cost credit and leverage.

Another way to describe the same dynamics is: financialization results when leverage and information asymmetry replace innovation and productive investment as the source of wealth creation.

Neoliberalism is the belief that the social order is defined and created by markets: if markets are free, participants, society and the political order are also free.
This conceptual framework is the perfect enabler for the dominance of credit-based, leveraged capital, i.e. Neofeudalism. In a "free market," those with access to nearly-free money can outbid everyone who must rely on savings from earned income to finance borrowing. In a "free market" where those with access to leverage and unlimited credit are more equal than everyone else, the ability of wage earners to acquire rentier assets such as rental housing, farmland and timberland is intrinsically limited by the financial system that makes credit and leverage scarce for the many and abundant for the few.
The moral bankruptcy of our financial and political elites is self-evident. Combine financialization, neoliberalism and moral bankruptcy, and you end up with self-serving parasitic elites.

[wayiwalk]

Re: Trump to win?

Bill is out there claiming Obamacare is crazy because he is starting the dialogue for what Hillary will propose as the solution, which will be single payer.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

...too bad for you and the rest of the so-called 'elite' that
so will chuck: (and, thankfully, so will woody)...

Yeah, but did you see where old Pat Buchanan was advancing the Woodsman political nihilism strategery?

What happens to America, if the uprisings and rebellions in the two parties - Donald Trump and Ted Cruz in the GOP, the Bernie Sanders revolt in the Democratic Party -- are turned back, and we get in 2017 the same old people and same old policies we repudiated in 2015 and 2016? What happens if the election, in which America demanded change in both parties, results in change in neither party?

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...on_131961.html

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

And if the DMV offices were closed in counties that are heavily black, how will black people get drivers' licenses or government-issued photo IDs, of which drivers licenses are the most common?
.

you sound like you think this is a bug, not a feature.

[Polish_Silver]

Re: Trump to win?

you sound like you think this is a bug, not a feature.

I don't know about your area, but in the last two states I lived in, 90% of the DMV employees were black!

Any system to verify voter identity and eligibility could in principle be used to exclude legitimate voters.

Should we therefore not test voter eligibility?

[Polish_Silver]

Re: Trump to win?

That's definitely a piece of it but I don't think it gets to the heart of the disagreement. As I see Trump supporters, they are completely and utterly disillusioned. I came across this cartoon which I think gets to the core issue rather well.

I think the cartoon is spot on. Trump at least talks about real problems. Not that his solutions are "real".

[Milton Kuo]

Re: Trump to win?

you sound like you think this is a bug, not a feature.

I don't understand what you mean. Are you saying that black people are currently unable to get drivers licenses or have to go through a far more difficult process somehow?