The Politics Thread

[DramatistDreamer]

@marceline That's so typical!

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 It reminds me of all the complaining that some voters did during the Democratic primary that they weren't allowed to vote in closed primaries because they weren't registered Democrats!  Did they not take the time to check their state's Registrar of Voters to check what the guidelines/requirements to vote? 

Some of these folks act so brand new.

[marceline]

 

I've said before that Pence would be worse and he would in SO many ways but Trump quitting would be the ultimate sellout of his supporters. All these alt-right loons who feel like they're on top of the world would be abandoned by their lord and master and left in his place would be exactly the establishment "swamp" they thought they were getting rid of. 

[GregNYC]

 

That might be true for your company, but polls indicate that the rust belt voters overwhelmingly disapprove of the TPP. They voted for Trump in 2016 and will vote for him in 2020 if he keeps his word and not sign the TPP.

 

Hillary supporting the TPP until the last few months and saying that coal plants should be shut down does not win over the rust belt voters. If the South right of work states are getting manufacturing jobs, then it only convinces the rust belt voters to vote Republican.

[marceline]

 

 

That's fine with me. Watching the people at my company deal with this has been one of the few bright spots considering how much they gave to Trump's campaign.

[JaneAusten]

I don't recall mentioning Hillary Clinton in any of this and Mitch McConnell and much of the GOP have already acknowledged the same thing about the coal jobs. Exactly how does losing jobs to the south where right to work states pay far less in wages going to endear anyone. These same voters have overwhelmingly supported raising the minimum wage in state elections across the country. Right to work is a nice way of saying no unions, no mass collective bargaining, no bargaining power, the right can pay us less money and get richer. I think people in the rust belt, still fairly heavy union jobs, get this.

 

People want jobs. You keep saying that people voted because of the TPP and will vote the same way again? Not unless it proves jobs came back. Many of these same people voted for Barack Obama. By the way who saved the US Auto Industry when the beloved GOP wanted to abort and let them crash but has no problem bailing out a financial industry who has not paid the federal government back one dime. So unless the trickle down economic plan, the tax cuts for the rich lead to more jobs, not passing the TPP is meaningless. I didn't support it anyway so I could careless. But people also claim to hate NAFTA? Why? Because they think it lost them jobs.

 

So GM cuts 2000 jobs, more mftg jobs gone, and unemployment in that part of the country rises and you still think these people who supposedly voted due to the TPP are going to vote the same way, not caring that the person who was against it also promised a ton of mftg jobs coming back from China and Mexico?

 

And I am still waiting for someone to tell me what Bernie Sanders plan is for bringing jobs back to the rust belt other than not signing a trade deal? There is none again because these jobs are not coming back. So does he have a plan to retrain people, to relocate them to areas where there are jobs available? I'll wait while this question gets answered. And I would love to hear this plan if there is one.

Edited November 16, 2016 by JaneAusten

[DramatistDreamer]

Sorry. Broken chain message, that I had to remove.

 

Edited November 16, 2016 by DramatistDreamer

[Skin]

Those manufacturing jobs are not coming back. This is a reality of the world we live in. America over the past 20+ years has become a consumer culture, and getting into a trade war with all of these countries will be a disaster. No one wants to pay $100.00 for a bag of coffee grounds, or $5,000 for a spare tire. We are vulnerable because we consume everything from every other country and our dependence has fueled this behavior for decades now. Going back to everything being American made is no longer feasible and corporations aren't going to foot the bill for it.

 

I feel bad for Wisconsin and Michigan because their economies have been devastated but at the same time this is exactly what has been happening to the millennial generation since the 2007 housing crisis tanked the economy. Their insistence that they are too good for customer service jobs and refuse to learn new skills is only an impediment to themselves, and blaming immigrants, people of color, women, LGBTQX and other minorities is ridiculous.

Edited November 16, 2016 by Skin

[DramatistDreamer]

Edited November 16, 2016 by DramatistDreamer

[marceline]

 

Back when John McCain was running for president he told people at a campaign event that manufacturing jobs weren't coming back and that we had to figure out what to do next. I was amazed by his honesty and respected the hell out of him. This was the same John McCain who one remarked that immigrants, legal or not, were all God's children. So many people on the right lost their humanity once Obama was elected. Losing the White House broke them.

[Ms. Quartermaine]

 

I haven't read the whole article yet, but yes, that first paragraph is me. *sigh*

[ReddFoxx]

It's necessary for anyone running for President to acknowledge that manufacturing is no longer viable. Misleading voters into thinking that these jobs are coming back is absurd. Most people aren't even aware of how problematic a trade war would be or the consequences that would result from it. Venezuela went hard against trade and now you have people waiting in line everyday just for basic items. Granted, the price controls there have made matters worse, anti-trade policy has caused much of the problem.

[Eric83]

Myths Democrats Swallowed That Cost Them the Election

 

http://www.newsweek.com/myths-cost-democrats-presidential-election-521044

 

Some of my favorite tidbits from the article:

 

The first big criticism this year was that the DNC had sponsored “only” six debates between Clinton and Bernie Sanders in some sort of conspiracy to impede the Vermont senator. This rage was built on ignorance: The DNC at first announced it would sponsor six debates in 2016, just as it had in 2008 and 2004. (In 2012, Barack Obama was running for re-election. Plus, while the DNC announced it would sponsor six debates in 2008, only five took place.) Debates cost money, and the more spent on debates, the less available for the nominee in the general election. Plus, there is a reasonable belief among political experts that allowing the nominees to tear each other down over and over undermines their chances in the general election, which is exactly what happened with the Republicans in 2012. Still, in the face of rage by Sanders supporters, the number of DNC-sponsored debates went up to nine—more than have been held in almost 30 years. Plans for a 10th one, scheduled for May 24, were abandoned after it became mathematically impossible for Sanders to win the nomination.

 

Almost every email that set off the “rigged” accusations was from May 2016. (One was in late April; I’ll address that below.) Even in the most ridiculous of dream worlds, Sanders could not have possibly won the nomination after May 3—at that point, he needed 984 more pledged delegates, but there were only 933 available in the remaining contests. And political pros could tell by the delegate math that the race was over on April 19, since a victory would require him to win almost every single delegate after that, something no rational person could believe.  

Sanders voters proclaimed that superdelegates, elected officials and party regulars who controlled thousands of votes, could flip their support and instead vote for the candidate with the fewest votes. In other words, they wanted the party to overthrow the will of the majority of voters. That Sanders fans were wishing for an establishment overthrow of the electorate more common in banana republics or dictatorships is obscene. (One side note: Sanders supporters also made a big deal out of the fact that many of the superdelegates had expressed support for Clinton early in the campaign. They did the same thing in 2008, then switched to Obama when he won the most pledged delegates. Same thing would have happened with Sanders if he had persuaded more people to vote for him.)

 

According to a Western European intelligence source, Russian hackers, using a series of go-betweens, transmitted the DNC emails to WikiLeaks with the intent of having them released on the verge of the Democratic Convention in hopes of sowing chaos. And that’s what happened—just a couple of days before Democrats gathered in Philadelphia, the emails came out, and suddenly the media was loaded with stories about trauma in the party. Crews of Russian propagandists—working through an array of Twitter accounts and websites, started spreading the story that the DNC had stolen the election from Sanders. (An analysis provided to Newsweek by independent internet and computer specialists using a series of algorithms show that this kind of propaganda, using the same words, went from Russian disinformation sources to comment sections on more than 200 sites catering to liberals, conservatives, white supremacists, nutritionists and an amazing assortment of other interest groups.)

 

She was playing the long game—attacking Sanders strongly enough to win, but gently enough to avoid alienating his supporters. Given her overwhelming support from communities of color—for example, about 70 percent of African-American voters cast their ballot for her—Clinton had a firewall that would be difficult for Sanders to breach.

When Sanders promoted free college tuition—a primary part of his platform that attracted young people—that didn’t mean much for almost half of all Democrats, who don’t attend—or even plan to attend—plan to attend a secondary school. In fact, Sanders was basically telling the working poor and middle class who never planned to go beyond high school that college students—the people with even greater opportunities in life—were at the top of his priority list.

 

I have seen the opposition book assembled by Republicans for Sanders, and it was brutal. The Republicans would have torn him apart. And while Sanders supporters might delude themselves into believing that they could have defended him against all of this, there is a name for politicians who play defense all the time: losers.

Here are a few tastes of what was in store for Sanders, straight out of the Republican playbook: He thinks rape is A-OK. In 1972, when he was 31, Sanders wrote a fictitious essay in which he described a woman enjoying being raped by three men. Yes, there is an explanation for it—a long, complicated one, just like the one that would make clear why the Clinton emails story was nonsense. And we all know how well that worked out.

Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.

Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.” The Republicans had at least four other damning Sanders videos (I don’t know what they showed), and the opposition research folder was almost 2-feet thick. (The section calling him a communist with connections to Castro alone would have cost him Florida.) In other words, the belief that Sanders would have walked into the White House based on polls taken before anyone really attacked him is a delusion built on a scaffolding of political ignorance.

 

The people who hate Trump but proclaimed they were #NeverHillary played themselves. They are not the same person, they are not friends, Hillary did not ask him to run so she could win easily, and Hillary would not have put someone from Breitbart as her chief strategist and have a bunch of Ku Klux Klan supporters as potential cabinet picks. But carry on with your conspiracy theories that Bernie was robbed because he won caucus states where 500 people voted in a high school gymnasium statewide.

[JaneAusten]

It's amazing how we learn nothing from history. People can't even remember what a state this country was in 8 years ago. But the US has been moving from a MFTG centric economy to SVC centric for years. And the angst being experienced is the same pain people experienced as we went from AGR to MFTG.

 

There will be people lost in the transition - we have seen some of that. But it's really the millennials who are the worst, many of them with college degrees that apparently are either worthless or they aren't looking hard enough for jobs or not going to areas where they may be able to find jobs that meet their educational requirements. (I have a nephew that is a Bernie lover who fits into category 1 and 2. And he sits home collecting unemployment. He thinks Bernie's plan to raise the minimum wage so he can work at McDonalds and make a living wage is the answer). I don't know what it is honestly. I read an article in Forbes the other day who interviewed CEO's across the country and we currently have 2 million jobs that can't be filled due to lack of skills. One of the reasons immigrants from Asian countries in particular is so high. So why aren't these millennials going to the areas where these jobs are available or pursuing degrees in areas that might employ them.

 

No one ever suggested Clinton was not a flawed candidate but at least she had a retooling program for some of these people. Some of it was pie in the sky but at least it was a starting point. People want to continue to blame Clinton for changing her position on TPP and not crediting Sanders for pushing her. And want to blame her for being honest about the coal industry? It must always be an attack. But hey their leader was the main attacker and never really stopped, what can one expect. And I am still waiting to hear Sanders plan for bringing jobs back or retraining people.

[DramatistDreamer]

[Skin]

Bannon is incredibly dangerous, he is against globalization and against diversity and inclusion - and pretty much only cares about the white half of this country.

 

 

I would say not just millennials, but also the older citizens who also want to retire but can't. The Republicans are going after medicare and medicade, which will devastate the older citizens who already don't have enough to live off of. If it gets much worse you will end up in a society not unlike that of a depressed China. Where we have the Generation X-er's sheltering everyone - their children and their parents - if they can afford it.There's a bottle neck happening on both sides here and they are both getting squeezed. You have people not wanting to vacate jobs because they are unsure about being able to retire, which directly effects the graduating students because there are no opportunities for them to enter the workforce. Their both getting squeezed, the middle can't move, and prices for everything are continuously escalating.

 

The student debt is also a massive issue, these students can't pay back their loans and they can't create additional costs like moving to a place they have no foothold in. Most of them don't have good enough credit to pay for things they can't afford when they are already hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. That's what happens when you tell an entire generation they have to go to college in order to get a good job.

Edited November 16, 2016 by Skin