US Politics: Mueller Monday

[OldGimletEye]

Perhaps I was a bit too hasty, in concluding, that Jeanine Pirro would win this week’s Conservative Dumb Ass Of The Week.

It looks like there is a strong contender here.

Or maybe this clown gets The Conservative Bullshit Artist of The Week.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/how-not-respond-paul-manaforts-criminal-indictment

Quote

Corey Lewandowski, who helped lead Donald Trump’s presidential campaign before Paul Manafort did, appeared on Fox Business Network this morning to talk about Manafort’s criminal indictment. In the process, Lewandowski presented a new talking point: let’s blame the FBI.

“If the public reports are true, and there was a time where Paul Manafort was under a FISA warrant before coming to the Trump campaign, why is it the FBI never reached out to me as the campaign manager, never reached out to Donald Trump, and said: ‘Look, you might want to pause for a second and take a look before you bring this guy on board as a volunteer to hunt delegates to you,’” Lewandowski argued.

I see. So, it’s not Trump World’s fault they hired a suspected criminal to lead Trump’s political operation; it’s federal law enforcement’s fault for not discouraging Trump World.

 

[GAROVORKIN]

8 hours ago, ThinkerX said:

You need to update your political thesaurus something terrible.  This is one article of several that describes what I meant by the US becoming a 'Stan':

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/opinion/america-becomes-a-stan.html

As to 'the man on horseback' presiding over a ruined economy, give it time - say, another year or two.  Contemplate the mid term implications of that disastrous tax cut for the rich currently being hammered out, gerrymandering, and the republican parties determination to toady to the billionaire class.  (Last newsflash, the republicans are generously considering keeping the tax deduction for property taxes.)   The middle class is not in danger of imploding, it IS imploding. 

What follows the 'man on horseback' is a decades long 'depression' that could, in the worst case result in the violent breakup of the US (possible, but not likely.)  Multiple local 'bright spots' and even limited recoveries are possible, though the overall trend will be towards (corporate) autocracy.  Oh, we'll still have elections, and on occasion they'll change things for the better, but the autocratic element will persist.  Ultimately, the long depression gives way to a society that would be utterly alien to us in the present day.  I really, really, want to be wrong about this.

DMC515 is young enough to where he might see the society that forms after the long depression.

 

A major depression is a possibility here. If it happens, what will be there to bail us out? At the time of the Great Depression , we had a substantial manufacturing base which could create jobs . Today  we don't have traditional manufacturing jobs anymore to provide employment . Even with the jobs we have now, there is no longer  the possibility of job security , longterm employment or even a comfortable retirement. 

[LongRider]

29 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

I see. So, it’s not Trump World’s fault they hired a suspected criminal to lead Trump’s political operation; it’s federal law enforcement’s fault for not discouraging Trump World.

Trump don't need no help from the steekin' FBI, he hires the best people!  Corey should know this.

 

[Tywin et al.]

Yesterday I asked if Papadopoulos’ arrest and conviction was a known thing in D.C. It appears that no one had any idea that it happened. It also appears that the question now isn’t whether or not he was wearing a wire, but how many people were wearing wires.

Also, and this is even more telling, it’s being reported by several sources that Trump has been trying to get Ivanka and Jared to leave D.C. for weeks. Even our idiot in chief realizes his house of cards is collapsing.

Oh, and Kevin Spacey can go to hell. As far as I’m concerned, that show ended after the first episode of the second season.

[Rippounet]

9 hours ago, Altherion said:

But it is not like yesterday to the people affected by this -- for the majority of them, it was before they were born.

Hardly matters: the socio-economic consequences of segregation are still here. In fact, you pretty much have forms of economic segregation throughout the US. If anything, it's far more insidious since the absence of de jure segregation allows people to blame the victims for their own situation. That's why historical perspective matters: it explains the current socio-economic structure. Without it you'd directly fall into racism.

9 hours ago, Altherion said:

I meant irrelevant in the sense that they had no chance of stopping the changes. You are right in that even a relatively small minority can be decisive in a winner-takes-all system. However, you are wrong about not much having changed: note that while there is a considerable number of white Southerners who still feel aggrieved, they are no longer the only ones -- the interesting part is that there are now plenty of people in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and the like who are angry. The man quoted in the article I linked in the previous thread is from Ohio. The anecdote related by ThinkerX is, I believe, from Alaska. What was once a regional phenomenon is becoming national.

Well, I don't think I've read those quotes.
So with that in mind, I think white resentment is less racially motivated in the north than in the south.

9 hours ago, Altherion said:

Not much, but a statement averaging over tens or hundreds of millions of people is also not much of an argument.

Again, you're averaging over way too many people on the basis of an irrelevant characteristic. The fact that George W. Bush and some laid off coal-miner in West Virginia are both white implies practically nothing about their respective positions in society.

Not really. They're still better off than most other racial groups, but that doesn't mean that they're all right in absolute terms.

But the entire point of affirmative action is that it doesn't necessarily have to be about absolute terms. You could have most whites being under the poverty threshold and affirmative action would still be relevant if members of minorities were still significantly poorer on average than white people.
How well off the majority of the population is isn't that relevant for programs that were always aimed at giving the same opportunities to members of minorities as white people.
The fact that there are less opportunities for everybody is a separate -and much more worrying- problem.

And it's not just about George W. Bush versus coal miners. The middle-class may be shrinking but you still have an upper middle-class that is predominantly white.
Generally speaking, averages do matter. They may not matter to the laid off coal-miner, but they still give a more accurate picture of society than what you're saying. And the picture is that, even with a shrinking middle-class that means whites are more at risk of becoming poor, members of minorities are still far more likely to fall into poverty.

We're adopting different perspectives on this, but I've already addressed all this earlier in a different post. Basically minorities are not to blame for the current situation. Nor are immigrants in fact. And it boggles my mind that the impoverishment of America could lead to racial resentment of all things.
But I'm tempted to think this is the result of decades of racially-conscious policies while at the same time doing everything possible to suppress class consciousness.
 

9 hours ago, Altherion said:

Very easily: all the authorities have to do is enforce the rules of decorum. The right to protest is not the right to silence others by roughing them up or by means of vandalism and arson. The university administrators have the disciplinary tools that can be used to maintain order, they're just not using them.

I partly agree here.
At least, I think it shouldn't be up to protesters to fight some forms of speech.
Just last week I was talking about the violence in Charlotesville with some of my students and they just couldn't understand why people like Spencer or Cantrell weren't arrested.
At some point I simply let out "well the nazi party is legal in the US, it's the communist party that isn't."
And there was silence. Because suddenly we all realized what it really meant.
When you think about it, it explains so much.
 

[Rippounet]

57 minutes ago, GAROVORKIN said:

A major depression is a possibility here.

The latest Time magazine says only 16 states have enough cash to withstand another recession.

[DanteGabriel]

5 hours ago, Sword of Doom said:

I missed racist John Kelly both siding the civil war along with him pushing that revisionist white washed view of the civil war like a good white supremacist.

Ta-Nehisi Coates responded to Kelly's whitewashing bullshit. It's worth a read. A beautiful and authoritative response that rancid sack of white supremacist shit.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/ta-nehisi-coates-john-kelly-civil-war

[Rippounet]

This article ties in to several discussions here.

Quote

 

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/2017-10-27/european-roots-alt-right

The alt-right is not a highbrow, sophisticated academic movement—it is still mostly an online mob of white nationalist trolls. Yet it would also be wrong to say that the alt-right possesses no philosophical foundation. It rests, first and foremost, on a Nietzschean rejection of democracy and egalitarianism.  The alt-right is fighting (and sometimes winning) in the realm of ideas, and successfully combating it requires knowing what those ideas are.

[...]

The European New Rright flirted with, but eventually rejected, a politics based on overt racism. Instead, the movement grounded its arguments in culture. ENR thinkers rejected the idea that all human beings are generally interchangeable and posited instead that every individual views the world from a particular cultural lens; inherited culture, that is, is a vital part of every person’s identity. They further argued that all cultures have a “right to difference,” or a right to maintain their sovereignty and cultural identity, free from the homogenizing influence of global capitalism and multiculturalism. The right of cultures to preserve their identity in turn implied their right to exclude or expel groups and ideas that threatened their cohesion and continuity.

Although de Benoist claimed that his movement stood outside the traditional left-right dichotomy, its rejection of egalitarianism and its far-right intellectual antecedents clearly indicate its right-wing orientation. Yet the ENR also used left-wing theories and rhetoric. It adopted the New Left’s opposition to global financial capitalism and borrowed arguments about cultural particularity from anticolonial movements, concluding, for instance, that European colonial projects had been a mistake and that the United States was trying to Americanize every corner of the globe, destroying distinct cultures along the way.

[...]

Despite the ENR’s left-wing elements, critics of the movement claim that its politics are little more than a rebranding of fascism. Whatever its philosophical underpinnings, the ENR’s hostility to immigration and multiculturalism is, practically speaking, similar to that of other, more explicitly racist far-right movements.

 

 

[Mlle. Zabzie]

9 hours ago, dmc515 said:

  Consumer confidence is likely to dissipate soon though, particularly if and when tax reform inevitably fails.

I'm relatively certain that something is going to happen on the tax front.  I'm not 100% sure what (no one is), but after crashing and burning on health care, something needs to happen.  Now, is that something likely to be "reform" in the 1984/1986 sense?  Not a chance. That was a bipartisan effort (quaint as that sounds) and there were years of discussion before anything was done.  The massive lobbies are already in gear and working over time to protect SALT deductions, etc.  Now if your point is that Kansas tells us what the results of what they are proposing will be, then I agree with that, but that will take a few years to really sink in.

 

[OldGimletEye]

Word on the street on who Trump will appoint to the FED:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/30/16571488/jerome-powell-federal-reserve

Quote

Six or seven years ago, I think it’s safe to say that nobody had Jerome Powell in mind as a likely future chair of the US Federal Reserve. But then again, six or seven years ago, nobody had Donald Trump in mind as a likely future president of the United States. But on Monday, well-sourced accounts indicated that an unlikely president is set to announce the appointment of a new Fed chair whose candidacy has grown to seem increasingly inevitable in recent weeks. Republicans will like that Powell is a Republican, Democrats will like that he isn’t crazy or corrupt in some obvious way, and he’ll likely sail through the confirmation process.

Well, at least, it ain’t that damn Kevin Warsh. And Taylor doesn’t deserve it either.

.......................

As far as I know Kimberly Clausing does most of her research on corporate tax policy, so it’s interesting to read what she has to say. At least a hell of lot more than "Dow 36000" Kevin Hastett has to say.

http://equitablegrowth.org/in-conversation/equitable-growth-in-conversation-kimberly-a-clausing/

Quote

In this installment, Equitable Growth’s Executive Director and Chief Economist Heather Boushey talks with Kimberly A. Clausing, the Thormund A. Miller and Walter Mintz Professor of Economics at Reed College. They discuss tax reform, changes to the corporate income tax, and who gains when taxes on capital are cut.

 

[Shryke]

1 hour ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

I'm relatively certain that something is going to happen on the tax front.  I'm not 100% sure what (no one is), but after crashing and burning on health care, something needs to happen.  Now, is that something likely to be "reform" in the 1984/1986 sense?  Not a chance. That was a bipartisan effort (quaint as that sounds) and there were years of discussion before anything was done.  The massive lobbies are already in gear and working over time to protect SALT deductions, etc.  Now if your point is that Kansas tells us what the results of what they are proposing will be, then I agree with that, but that will take a few years to really sink in.

 

I originally figured we'd just see another Bush Tax Cuts style bullshit. They'd go on about tax reform this and that, realise they couldn't do shit because they are a house of nazi monkeys and instead just slash taxes for the rich for a decade and go home.

But it's looking more and more like the donors won't be satisfied with just temporary tax cuts and that the caucus itself is incapable of agreeing on anything since there's people on both sides demanding their pounds of flesh and nowhere left to carve it from. The whole issue right now is they want permanent, massive and non-deficit-increasing tax cuts for rich people and there's no way to square that circle under the current setup of the US government. And I'm less certain with each passing day that anyone is willing to give up their bit of the trinity.

Especially with looming government funding issues where the Demorats are (hopefully) going to be demanding their bribe for keeping Ryan's ass from failing at basic governance.

[Tywin et al.]

1 hour ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

I'm relatively certain that something is going to happen on the tax front.  I'm not 100% sure what (no one is), but after crashing and burning on health care, something needs to happen.  Now, is that something likely to be "reform" in the 1984/1986 sense?  Not a chance. That was a bipartisan effort (quaint as that sounds) and there were years of discussion before anything was done.  The massive lobbies are already in gear and working over time to protect SALT deductions, etc.  Now if your point is that Kansas tells us what the results of what they are proposing will be, then I agree with that, but that will take a few years to really sink in.

 

What makes you say that? They could have the votes to do something major, and they desperately need to change the narrative, even if the benefits would be short lived. Who knows what will actually happen, but I wouldn’t take anything off of the table at this point.

[Shryke]

13 hours ago, Altherion said:

But it is not like yesterday to the people affected by this -- for the majority of them, it was before they were born.

No, it wasn't. The problem with your racist bullshit is crap like this.

Fucking Jim Crow is still within living memory. People alive today were effected directly by hugely racist government policy.

Your attempt to pretend otherwise is simply wrong. Racism fucked people alive right now hard. It hasn't been that long.

[TrueMetis]

15 minutes ago, Shryke said:

No, it wasn't. The problem with your racist bullshit is crap like this.

Fucking Jim Crow is still within living memory. People alive today were effected directly by hugely racist government policy.

Your attempt to pretend otherwise is simply wrong. Racism fucked people alive right now hard. It hasn't been that long.

Not that it matters all that much, it having been your mother/father or grandmother/grandfather who was fucked directly by the government doesn't actually lessen the effect on you all that much.

[GAROVORKIN]

33 minutes ago, Shryke said:

No, it wasn't. The problem with your racist bullshit is crap like this.

Fucking Jim Crow is still within living memory. People alive today were effected directly by hugely racist government policy.

Your attempt to pretend otherwise is simply wrong. Racism fucked people alive right now hard. It hasn't been that long.

 

14 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Not that it matters all that much, it having been your mother/father or grandmother/grandfather who was fucked directly by the government doesn't actually lessen the effect on you all that much.

Yes we know the history Slavery Dred Scott decisions  ,  Civil War, Plessy vs Ferguson , and Jim Crow with a all its Horror and injustices which were many.  This lasted  lasted well into the 1950'. But it ended over time with wthe efforts of meant like Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks   President Lyndon Johnson, and many and many many other. Then were cases  like  Brown vs the board education 1954 which rendered school segregation unconstitutional and illegal and then was Little Rock  and then there was the Civil Rights act 1964.  Yes there still racism and bigotry  but one could argue that things have gotten a lot better.  This is in many ways a different world.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Yesterday I asked if Papadopoulos’ arrest and conviction was a known thing in D.C. It appears that no one had any idea that it happened. It also appears that the question now isn’t whether or not he was wearing a wire, but how many people were wearing wires.

Yeah, that seems really feasible to me given this guys' profile. As near as I can tell he was mentioned once by the Trump campaign, and that was in a press release shortly after being hired.

It strikes me that an airport is like the perfect place to arrest him without fanfare as well. You just have TSA pull him into a sideroom somewhere and then have a couple of plainclothes guys walk him out some authorized personnel entrance and no one is the wiser. 

[Seli]

The ways aspects of US society works against its people come together in this https://qz.com/1108193/whats-killing-americas-new-mothers/ long piece exploring the high mortality of young mothers in the USA compared to the rest of the western world. It shows some of the intersections between poverty, sexism, racism, medical insurance, labor law (as in maternal leave that could be improved.

Some excerpts:

Quote

On that May day, she joined one of the US’s most shameful statistics. With an estimated 26.4 deaths for every 100,000 live births in 2015, America has the highest maternal mortality rate of all industrialized countries—by several times over. In Canada, the rate is 7.3; in Western Europe, the average is 7.2, with many countries including Italy, Norway, Sweden, and Austria showing rates around 4. More women die of childbirth-related causes in the US than they do in Iran (20.8), Lebanon (15.3), Turkey (15.8), Puerto Rico (15.1), China (17.7), and many more.

...

Determining exactly why so many American mothers are dying of, or suffering through, pregnancy is a gargantuan public-health puzzle. Through the course of reporting this story, it quickly became apparent that there is no single reason, but instead a complex brew of factors that, together, point to deep-rooted, systemic problems that run through the entire social and health care system of the country. Gender, class, race—and across all, a fragmented, mainly private health system—conspire to work against maternal health. In many ways, it’s a litmus test of the health of health care in the US.

...

Black mothers, for example, are three times more likely to die or suffer serious illness from pregnancy-related causes than white women, with at least 40 deaths per 100,000 live births on average, compared to 14 for white mothers. Native-American mothers are nearly twice as likely to die as their white peers.

...

Any analysis of race’s impact on the rates of maternal death necessarily overlaps with poverty. Black Americans are nearly three times more likely than whites to live below the poverty line, and suffer from the overall health consequences that come with being poor, affecting everything from life expectancy to chronic diseases. But that is just one facet of what’s going on. America’s Hispanic population, for instance, has rates of poverty comparable to blacks, yet it doesn’t experience a similar level of pregnancy-related tragedies. Moreover, major pregnancy complications occur at similar rates for black and white women, yet death and morbidity rates are higher among black women. Education doesn’t seem to close the gap, either: Black college graduates experience maternal mortality rates that are three times as high as their white counterparts. In fact they have worse birth outcomes than white high-school dropouts.

...

While the higher mortality rates of black mothers in the US cuts across class and economic background, a mother’s ability to pay for care is nevertheless an important factor in determining the outcome, regardless of her race. A direct correlation can be drawn between not being able to afford care and pregnancy-related deaths and morbidity. Texas, for instance, is the state with the highest number of uninsured people, and the state with the most maternal deaths.

Declercq is currently leading an effort to quantify childbirth practices and outcomes in the US. She says 13% of women who give birth are uninsured, forcing them to pay the cost of childbirth out of their own pockets. Another nearly 50% of deliveries are covered by Medicaid, the federally funded program that pays for prenatal care, delivery, and postnatal care for women who live at 133% or less of the poverty line.

 

[TrueMetis]

15 minutes ago, GAROVORKIN said:

 

Yes we know the history Slavery Dred Scott decisions  ,  Civil War, Plessy vs Ferguson , and Jim Crow with a all its Horror and injustices which were many.  This lasted  lasted well into the 1950'. But it ended over time with wthe efforts of meant like Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks   President Lyndon Johnson, and many and many many other. Then were cases  like  Brown vs the board education 1954 which rendered school segregation unconstitutional and illegal and then was Little Rock  and then there was the Civil Rights act 1964.  Yes there still racism and bigotry  but one could argue that things have gotten a lot better.  This is in many ways a different world.

Being beaten is better than being stabbed. But it's still not good. Things have improved sure, they gone for completely fucking inhumane to just terrible. Let's not pat ourselves on the back too hard now.

[GAROVORKIN]

8 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Being beaten is better than being stabbed. But it's still not good. Things have improved sure, they gone for completely fucking inhumane to just terrible. Let's not pat ourselves on the back too hard now.

I agree, there still a lot of work to be done.

[Seli]

21 minutes ago, GAROVORKIN said:

 

...Then were cases  like  Brown vs the board education 1954 which rendered school segregation unconstitutional and illegal ...

Yes. And at the same time destroyed the career of many African American teachers, since somehow white teachers were deemed better for the now mixed classes. Weird how that works when racisms somehow isn't an issue anymore, no?

Quote

In 1954, there were 82,000 black teachers; however, during the 11 years after the court ruling, some 38,000 black teachers and administrators lost their jobs.
After desegregation, 90 percent of black principals lost their jobs, mainly in southern states.
Qualified black teachers were often replaced with less qualified white teachers according to researcher Carol Karpinski; indeed, 85 percent of black teachers had college degrees compared to 75 percent of white teachers.

Observers cite two reasons for the firing. First, school boards assumed that people would not want white children to be taught by black teachers. Second, many black schools were closed down and integrated with white schools. As a result, teachers from the black schools were let go.

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=3572