Trump to Congresswomen: Go back to your own country!

[_honorentheos]

Ok, you're sore.

If you think voter turnout doesn't decide elections, you're in denial of facts. I accepted your evidence as presented. It's a fair point in relation to vote behavior in 2016 that doesn't change voter turnout mattered and is the focus of the majority of campaign activity. So. Ok.

[Guest]

If you keep in mind what was being said, I think you inserted taking it as an acceptance of Trump's characterization of them as anything other than freshmen. I really think a reread of the thread would disavow the idea that was being presented at any point. The first Democrat responses all pointed out it was wrong to get distracted by Trump's outrageous behavior. You'll note that from my first post on there was acknowledgement of both sides of this: Pointing out that Trump was being racists, and not letting him reframe the Democrats. Perhaps that should be worth thinking about given the idea acknowledging the tactic kept getting the Trump-framing reinserted in the thread by someone...just saying.

I'm not 100% sure I understand your first sentence, but I did not intend to imply that you were accepting or should accept Trump's factual claims about the Squad members. I am asserting that calling out the tactic doesn't move the discussion out of Trump's framing.

Here is the example that you directed me to:

You're claiming that just because the rightwing media wants everyone to believe four freshman congresswomen are the leaders of the Democrat party because they push all your buttons that this is therefore true? Then yeah, I disagree. Its just rightwing spin that you are swallowing hook, line and sinker.

If I were defending Trump and you argued this to me, I would be absolutely delighted. Why? Because it is an invitation to keep talking about the congresswomen, which is exactly what I want to talk about. There are an endless number of moves I could take to keep the argument focussed on Trump's claims about them. I could fire back and say "Trump didn't say they were in leadership positions. But it's clear they represent where the Democratic party wants to take us -- to socialism and anti-semitism." And now I'm still on the attack on the ground that Trump picked for battle.

Had Nancy Pelosi responded the way you described as the most effective, we'd have all the news shows tomorrow talking about whether Trump's statements about the congresswomen were fair or a cynical campaign tactic. But the important part is we're still talking about the substance of his claims. The voters hear Democrats, Anti-American, Anti-Semitism, "Hate America" over and over again.

I'm simply saying that, if you think framing is important (which we both seem to do), then it's much better to shift the frame so that the subject is something other than the accuracy of Trump's claims.

[_Res Ipsa]

Ok, you're sore.

If you think voter turnout doesn't decide elections, you're in denial of facts. I accepted your evidence as presented. It's a fair point in relation to vote behavior in 2016 that doesn't change voter turnout mattered and is the focus of the majority of campaign activity. So. Ok.

I'm not sore, but you're displaying a pretty nasty habit of taking personal swipes when you can't rebut an argument. Now you're claiming that I've taken the position that "voter turnout doesn't decide elections." That's flatly not true. If that's the way this is going to go, I'm done.

[_honorentheos]

We really see this whole thing very differently. Last I checked the whole thing started as a point about how Trump's tweet turned out to be quite tactical in nature and said tactic should be refuted when it arises. It seemed most responses who took it negatively reacted as if it was saying Trump was good or pulled one over on people by saying racist stuff. The back and forth has basically been a load of swipes at tangential crap where it seemed yesterday we finally arrived at a place of agreement as to what happened and what Democrats should be doing. So. There's that to add to this.

[_ajax18]

This is an excellent piece.

It's estimated the rate of increase over the entirety of the middle ages was around 2% total.

Didn't the plague killing off 1/3 of Europe help increase wages?

It was an incentive to sign up for an incredibly dangerous job on the off chance one could end up with a share of the profits brought back if one survived.

Isn't that how it was for the Vikings and Romans before them?

It's been estimated around 30% of global wealth has now been sucked into The Upside-Down. That's hard to quantify for all the reasons that allow it to exist. But even if high, that should offend just about everyone with how obscene that is and the consequences of it. In the face of global catastrophe due to climate change, it should be criminal.

That is significant and I would agree very troubling.

We stopped being able to sustain a household with just one income, and households increasingly needed both parents to work just to get by.

A lot of that is due to our sacred cow that everyone should get a doctorate and accrue the debt that goes along with it whether you planned on actually working for the next thirty years or not. But I do believe it's true that people in the 50s had higher incomes than we do but products and appliances were mostly American made and much more expensive than they are today.

And this is where globalization comes in. As noted above the middle class of America is being drained by an unseen, unrecognized vampire in the global uber-wealthy. They're even more vampiric when it comes to sucking the wealth out of developing countries susceptible to corruption and instability. It's estimated Russian oligarchs control more than 50% of Russia's wealth. This wasn't due to Putin. It was due to the West encouraging Yeltsin to sell Russian resources that would picked up by wealthy, corrupt individuals and exploited.

I still think working age Russians are doing better since the communism ended.

This brings up another point. The United States was protectionist during our period of industrial expansion. Land was portioned out in ways that allowed individuals with no means but a willingness to work and take risks to become landed rather than simply put up on the market to be bought by whomever commanded the best price.

Land that we are ever reminded was conquered from the Indians. How was this different than how the Romans managed the lands they conquered? Fight for the emperor and if your side wins you get to be a landowner.

But life isn't an even playing field. Again, as in biological evolution, once an organism has control of a niche it's not easy to displace it. Human beings would never have evolved from early primates, because there would never have been early primates, had an asteroid not killed off the dinosaurs and created conditions for mammals to move into the niche left behind. Similarly, people with wealth and advantage use that wealth and advantage to keep it and ensure their offspring benefit from it. That's not about capitalism or socialism or any other -ism. It's human nature. And it usually results in class structure forming and becoming rigidly entrenched as class mobility is reduced or even eliminated in the process.

This is a brilliant analogy. But I tend to see people seeking to make life better for their offspring as a virtue rather than a sin of racism or nepotism. Maybe people who aren't concerned for their children really shouldn't be reproducing. Maybe this is a trait that we need to let die out rather than perpetuate itself through intervention? As human beings we fix things only to lose the benefits of natural selection.

This is were the economic version of The Upside-Down comes back into the picture. We have an entrenching, wealth-accumulating elite with diminished ties to any particular national identify that for all intents and purposes should be recognized by most in the US as working against the average American's ability be equitably compensated for their intelligence and work, and participate in the benefits of growing economic wealth. Democrat or Republican, most voters in either party are not living in the economic Upside-Down. But for different reasons, members of both parties have taken up political arms against those on their side of the economy that results in both protecting the Upside-Down economy.

But we talked about this before. You can't raise taxes and keep money from going offshore. What can you do about it?

Code: Select all

Republicans have long been co-opted deliberately through cultural war issues and the mind-trick of slave morality. The average conservative voter is a net loser in the economy but the elite members of their political class, who are fully aware of their own disparity in economic conditions and allegiance to the Upside-Down over the US, have convinced them that any attempt to reverse the vacuum and stop the suction of wealth out into the Upside-Down is an act of a totalitarian state who would take away freedom for the sake of indulging the laziness and lack of ability of those voting for such change. Seem familiar?

Perhaps it sounds like GHWB's party and the New World Order he loved so much. To me DJT had the money to become the voice of the forgotten man (who up until 2016 had no voice) and for the most part has made an honest effort to make good on his campaign promises and his America first agenda.

Democrats, at least since the 80s, are just as interested in protecting the Upside-Down economy. It's not a misstatement to say third way Democrats have no interest in upsetting the balance of the global engines that feed wealth off into The Upside-Down. They have different views about what government's responsibility is to the future and how society should be structured but at it's core, the mainstream central Democrat party is just a different flavor of conservative that favors marriage equality and gun control over traditional marriage and the 2nd amendment. The two party system has been a devil's bargain for a while.

What exactly is Elizabeth Warren proposing to do about the upside down? What could she do about it if she were elected president?

[_honorentheos]

Ajax, to be brief and focus on the last question, Warren is in a different category from other progressives due to a combination of background and that she has essentially created a committee of experts and advisors to function as a think tank focused on the issues associated with the increasing inequality facing society. Her approach is at least based on substance, whether one agrees with her or not she ought to be taken seriously.

[_EAllusion]

Before Trump’s attack, the mainstream media framing for the Democrats was the Standard “Democrats in Disarray” trope, based on the squad’s criticism of Nancy Pelosi. Trump jumped in to throw Pelosi an anchor by making any rift even wider. The point wasn’t just to make the four the face of the Democrats: it was primarily to put Pelosi in a box. If she stands behind them, then the Democrats actually do stand for the horrible things these horrible women represent. If she says, no they don’t represent what the Democrats stand for, the rift between progressives and Pelosi gets wider and the frame in the press goes from Democrats in Disarray to Democrats in Chaos. Plus, his attack plays to his base. Pretty neat move.

I think it actually was that Trump was just watching Fox as he is wont to do, saw one of their segments attacking the "squad" and spouted off. I don't think there was any strategy to it. Trump has shown the ability to self-edit and definitely has some sense of what he thinks is good for him to say and not. So there is strategy in feeling free to make racial attacks as a cultural wedge, but when Trump goes on rants while live-tweeting Fox, the particulars don't seem to be part of any deep strategy. That's retconning President "Crazy uncle you should probably block on Facebook."

Fox attacks them because they the serve as their latest in a series of targets to portray the political enemy negatively. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in particular is just their new Hillary. They need to have a Hillary.

[_EAllusion]

Elizabeth Warren has so many policy proposals aimed at redistribution of power and wealth that it's hard to 1 or 2 sentence summarize it. She's not going to get any of them passed due to the Senate, though, and even if she did, the Supreme Court has 5 Republican partisans on it and would likely strike them down because they essentially are now a super-legislature. So it doesn't matter.

The absolute best case scenario for Democrats that is realistic is Thomas gets stubborn about not retiring if a Democrat wins in November 2020, dies shortly after, and tips the court balance. Democrats do really well in the Senate and have a slight majority. In that super-rosy scenario, Democrats will be able to pass what their most conservative members allow, which isn't anywhere near what Democratic candidates for President, even the most moderate ones, say they want. It's definitely no where near a hypothetical President Warren.

The current Democratic debates over policy exist in a fantasy-land.

The upshot if you are a Warren fan is she understands this and has a fleshed out plan to use executive powers to bend the regulatory state in her direction.

[_honorentheos]

More than any candidate, she seems to take the process seriously of understanding an issue in order to address it rather than rely on political gamesmanship to sell herself. I was looking for an article on that to share when I came across this that I think also captures the fact whether or not one agrees with her she seems to do the work to be taken seriously:

“What Warren has tapped into is that to most Democrats, it’s not about ideology [or] liberalism, it's about the economy’s out of balance. Nibbling around the edges and offering stale, old Democratic ideas of raising the minimum wage and shoring up Medicare and Social Security are just insufficient to dealing with the scale and scope of the problems we're facing in our economy,” said Dan Gerstein, who worked as a speech writer on the presidential and vice presidential campaigns of former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman. “But she's doing it in a way that doesn't necessarily demonize business, but talks about the bad actors in capitalism. And again, very much differentiating [herself] from Bernie.”

Gerstein said Warren is finding a way to speak to deep structural imbalances in the economy and the fact that many Americans feel the system is rigged against them, but without raising alarms that she’s far outside the mainstream.

https://www.politico.com/amp/story/2019 ... en-1369874

[_honorentheos]

Here's one on the topic I was originally looking for:

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/ ... am-1376718

Warren had her game plan in place months before her announcement. She rolled out a centerpiece anti-corruption plan in August, and a housing measure a month later. Warren aides and allies spent the fall prepping other potential proposals.

The campaign has many more initiatives in the pipeline. Aides told POLITICO they're in the process of adding more policy staff, to ward off any rival looking to steal her policy thunder. The focus on policy is also reflected in the campaign's salary structure: The head of the policy team, Jon Donenberg, makes the same as the campaign manager and other senior leaders.

“It's all we can do to keep up with her,” said Donenberg, a Capitol Hill veteran who worked for former Rep. Henry Waxman and Sen. Richard Blumenthal before he joined Warren's 2012 campaign and then served as legislative director in her senate office. "The job of the policy shop is to help her fill in the details around these proposals, to present data, and to talk through the costs and benefits of various approaches.”

In the context of my other post, she stands apart from other progressives by being acedemically and experientially informed on the underlying issues driving inequality. And she is working on the foundations to build solutions and practical implementation strategies rather than just so promises to fix everything.

She's a philosopher queen.