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US Politics: A Tale of two Joes.


A Horse Named Stranger

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Enjoyed watching Jim Clyburn smack Joe Manchin around:

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Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," Clyburn told Fox News anchor Bret Baier that's Manchin's suggestions of requiring bipartisan support for voting tights caused him "pain."

“I am, as you know, a Black person, descended of people who were given the vote by the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The 15th amendment was not a bipartisan vote, it was a single party vote that gave Black people the right to vote," Clyburn told Baier.

"Manchin and others need to stop saying that because that gives me great pain for somebody to imply that the 15th Amendment of the United States Constitution is not legitimate because it did not have bipartisan buy-in," he added.

 

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2 hours ago, Durckad said:

Corporatism is a logical step of capitalism. There is nothing in capitalism that is anti-corporatism. 

That said capitalism is such a fuzzy term in today's politics that it often means whatever the person invoking it wants it to mean.

Same with socialism, communism, neoliberalism, any political buzzword.

Corporate structures don’t exist in Socialist economies?

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13 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Corporate structures don’t exist in Socialist economies?

I'm not sure a) where you are getting that idea from my post or b) what that has to do with my (and Larry's) point.

Do you think Corporatism is exclusive to socialist economies?

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3 hours ago, Lermo T.I. Krrrammpus said:

I'm not seeing how how that's different from capitalism. It seems to be a feature rather than a bug, not some separate thing.  

Calling it corporatism when we really mean "a very common and reoccurring phenomenon of capitalism" and pretending it's something distinct is confusing at best and more likely deliberately obfuscating.

Well, you only have to work for Motorola or AMD or Cyrix versus being at National Semi or Qualcomm for a few years to experience the difference between being able to compete in a free market and facing a corporatist environment where the opportunity to compete has been removed from the marketplace.

Facing Intel and their government backers, their customer lock-ups, and their overt efforts to destroy the competition (eg. "Operation Crush" or the European Court's ruling on Intel's use of MDF), companies like MOT, AMD or CRYX did not have the opportunity to participate in a free market, and it was bad for consumers everywhere.

Also, corporatism is kissing cousins with crony capitalism, as monopolist companies soon develop government relationships that allow them to capture regulators (see the banksters on Wall Street) or set the regulatory environment (see Big Oil) or milk the government (see Intel and the state of Israel).  Crony capitalism is capitalism perverted into the socializing of risks and the privatizing of profits.  Again, see the 2007-2008 financial crisis for how this ends up endangering the free market.

I draw your attention to just one effect of the financial crisis, and that is how the USA now has no companies that manufacture lead frames for the semiconductor industry.  Banks withdrew the access to capital for American lead frame manufacturers, and now the market has withered down to only two significant competitors.

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2 minutes ago, Kalsandra said:

Ironically Intel is sucking compared to AMD these days (largely around the shift to graphics cards and mobile chips smacking Intel around) but let's keep beating that horse

Intel has no strong motivation to innovate, as they dominate x86 market share in mobile, desktop, and the data center.  Decades of MDF abuse put AMD on a starvation diet for R&D.

This lack of competition hurts consumers, as AMD has to choose which market segment to invest their limited investment capital.  AMD's innovation in design and process technology means that they do end up leapfrogging Intel in whichever of the three segments they place their bets (missteps like Bulldozer aside), but they lack the access to capital necessary to compete on all three fronts simultaneously.

Intel doesn't even need to run their fabs at full capacity any more to suck up most of the free cash flow from the x86 market - this is corporatism at its worst.

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10 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

Well, you only have to work for Motorola or AMD or Cyrix versus being at National Semi or Qualcomm for a few years to experience the difference between being able to compete in a free market and facing a corporatist environment where the opportunity to compete has been removed from the marketplace.

Facing Intel and their government backers, their customer lock-ups, and their overt efforts to destroy the competition (eg. "Operation Crush" or the European Court's ruling on Intel's use of MDF), companies like MOT, AMD or CRYX did not have the opportunity to participate in a free market, and it was bad for consumers everywhere.

Also, corporatism is kissing cousins with crony capitalism, as monopolist companies soon develop government relationships that allow them to capture regulators (see the banksters on Wall Street) or set the regulatory environment (see Big Oil) or milk the government (see Intel and the state of Israel).  Crony capitalism is capitalism perverted into the socializing of risks and the privatizing of profits.  Again, see the 2007-2008 financial crisis for how this ends up endangering the free market.

I draw your attention to just one effect of the financial crisis, and that is how the USA now has no companies that manufacture lead frames for the semiconductor industry.  Banks withdrew the access to capital for American lead frame manufacturers, and now the market has withered down to only two significant competitors.

I do appreciate the explanation.  I just don't see how this isn't capitalism.  It's the natural progression of it. 

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28 minutes ago, Durckad said:

Do you think Corporatism is exclusive to socialist economies?

Of course not.  Corporatism is simply a way for individuals to pool their efforts  and act collectively.  Socialism is similar in its endeavors, is it not?  As such the implication that “corporatism” is somehow a capitalist phenomenon seemed… odd to me.

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17 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Of course not.  Corporatism is simply a way for individuals to pool their efforts  and act collectively.  Socialism is similar in its endeavors, is it not?  As such the implication that “corporatism” is somehow a capitalist phenomenon seemed… odd to me.

You seem to be using the sociological definition of corporatism.  I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that wasn't what McBigskie was talking about and doesn't seem to have much relevance to what Wilbur was describing either.

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29 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Of course not.  Corporatism is simply a way for individuals to pool their efforts  and act collectively.  Socialism is similar in its endeavors, is it not?  As such the implication that “corporatism” is somehow a capitalist phenomenon seemed… odd to me.

Okay. I see the disconnect here. I don't mean to imply that corporatism is exclusive to capitalism, merely that is a logical step of capitalism. I firmly reject that there is anything anti-capitalist about corporatism.

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12 minutes ago, Lermo T.I. Krrrammpus said:

You seem to be using the sociological definition of corporatism.  I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that wasn't what McBigskie was talking about and doesn't seem to have much relevance to what Wilbur was describing either.

Then what do they mean?  

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1 minute ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Then what do they mean?  

I'm going to hazard a guess, but simply put, conflating the free market with capitalism or assuming that one begets the other.

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5 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Then what do they mean?  

Well judging from their posts, and not to speak for them, but they seem to be suggesting something about monopolies and mass acumulation of weatlh within one entity in an industry.  I'm guessing they aren't talking about whether a society, at its most basic level, is organized along values of individualism vs cooperative behavior.  It seems a bit more specific than that.  

eta: at least that's what i'm gathering from context

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Further on not bothering to even conceal our nazi sympathies and aspiration.

"An Indiana GOP state senator said teachers ‘need to be impartial’ during lessons about Nazism and fascism"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/01/10/scott-baldwin-indiana-nazism-fascism/

Must be compassionate and gentle about nazis too, be understanding.  And if you aren't, remember, you'll make 'em mad and then there will be violence.

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No matter how many times I tell Google News to stop showing news from Fox, the Hill, etc., they still pop up in my feed. I'll give it to the Hill--they're great at headlines! Senate Democrats Grow Less Confident in Manchin

If it's true, wow--Dems are worse off than I thought.

Otherwise, it seems like the Hill is stuck reporting in 2021. 

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Judge mulls whether Trump’s silence on Jan. 6 could amount to ‘agreement’ with rioters
During a hearing on civil lawsuits stemming from the Capitol attack, Donald Trump’s lawyers claimed sweeping immunity for the former president.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/10/trump-immunity-jan-6-526839

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Donald Trump’s hours of silence while a violent mob ransacked the Capitol — egged on by his own words and tweets — could be plausibly construed as agreement with rioters’ actions, a federal judge suggested Monday.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta made the analysis as he pressed Trump’s lawyers about their efforts to dismiss a series of lawsuits against the former president seeking to hold him financially liable for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection.


“What do I do about the fact the president didn’t denounce the conduct immediately?” Mehta wondered, homing in on a central focus of congressional investigators probing Trump’s conduct that day. “Isn’t that, from a plausibility standpoint, enough to at least plausibly infer that the president agreed with the conduct of the people that were inside the Capitol that day?


Mehta’s questioning prompted Trump’s attorney, Jesse Binnall, to push back, forcefully arguing that Trump can’t conceivably face legal consequences for actions he did not take.

 

 

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10 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

Mehta’s questioning prompted Trump’s attorney, Jesse Binnall, to push back, forcefully arguing that Trump can’t conceivably face legal consequences for actions he did not take.

Horseshit.  Trump was the duly elected President of the United States.  He had a duty to act to protect and defend the US Constitution that he accepted, expressly, on 1/20/2016.  He absolutely had a duty to act.

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48 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Horseshit.  Trump was the duly elected President of the United States.  He had a duty to act to protect and defend the US Constitution that he accepted, expressly, on 1/20/2016.  He absolutely had a duty to act.

Remember when GWB was dismissing US attorneys for not following the Republican playbook? I thought that was bad, but now we've got arguments that a sitting president has no duty to stop a mob intent on overthrowing the government.

With every day, conservatives make the unthinkable ever more thinkable.

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