US Politics: Killin' Ya Hard With Hate

[IheartIheartTesla]

Yeah I'd hardly call the economy 'booming'. The metrics they use for those are typically rate of GDP growth and unemployment rate, for example. But once you start correlating the economy to people's feelings, you cant draw a straight line between rate of GDP growth and the latter. People are more likely to respond to inflation, cost of consumer goods, gas prices etc... which are part of economic indicators for sure, but all indicators are not equal in people's minds.

[Luzifer's right hand]

1 hour ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

Yeah I'd hardly call the economy 'booming'. The metrics they use for those are typically rate of GDP growth and unemployment rate, for example. But once you start correlating the economy to people's feelings, you cant draw a straight line between rate of GDP growth and the latter. People are more likely to respond to inflation, cost of consumer goods, gas prices etc... which are part of economic indicators for sure, but all indicators are not equal in people's minds.

Fun fact no country has a health care sector that is a bigger part of its GDP. Usually hidden in the "service sector". The service is a dropping life expectancy and insane costs I guess.

The more expensive it gets the better for the GDP.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

11 hours ago, Kalnak the Magnificent said:

Is it true? Doesn't actually matter in the least.

This is the crux of it. Republicans take 15 seconds to make up some crazy bullshit and Democrats need 5-10 minutes to explain why it's insane. The general public is dumb, uninformed and doesn't want to listen to a policy explanation with any depth.  

[Kalbear]

To be clear not all of it is bullshit.

Gas prices are now $5.50/gallon in my neck of the woods. That's a daily reminder to most people about inflation and expenses. I'm personally of the mind that gas should be MORE expensive than that as a whole, but there's absolutely a correlation between the viewpoint of the economy and the viewpoint at the pump. 

[Zorral]

With this shyte putting up with it she ain't!

Georgia Prosecutor Sharply Rebukes House Republican Investigating Her
The prosecutor, Fani T. Willis, accused Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio of trying to obstruct her prosecution of the racketeering case against Donald J. Trump and his allies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/07/us/fani-willis-jim-jordan-trump-georgia.html?

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The district attorney leading a criminal case against Donald J. Trump and his allies in Georgia accused Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio of trying to obstruct her prosecution of the case in a sharply worded letter she sent on Thursday.

Soon after the district attorney, Fani T. Willis, a Democrat, announced last month that she was bringing a racketeering case against Mr. Trump and 18 other defendants for their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, Mr. Jordan, a Republican and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said that he was going to investigate Ms. Willis over whether her prosecution of Mr. Trump was politically motivated.

In her letter, Ms. Willis accused Mr. Jordan of trying “to obstruct a Georgia criminal proceeding and to advance outrageous partisan misrepresentations,” and of not understanding how the state’s racketeering law works.

“Your attempt to invoke congressional authority to intrude upon and interfere with an active criminal case in Georgia is flagrantly at odds with the Constitution,” she added. “The defendants in this case have been charged under state law with committing state crimes. There is absolutely no support for Congress purporting to second guess or somehow supervise an ongoing Georgia criminal investigation and prosecution.”

 

 

[Kalbear]

Awww. Mark Meadows denied changing venue because, as it turns out, trying to steal an election is not actually part of your work as chief of staff normally:

https://www.npr.org/2023/09/08/1198557760/judge-rejects-mark-meadows-efforts-to-move-georgia-racketeering-case-to-federal-?utm_medium=JSONFeed&utm_campaign=news&utm_source=press.coop

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"The Court finds that the evidence presented does not show that most of the remaining overt acts were related to the scope of Meadows' role as Chief of Staff," he wrote, adding that Meadows "cannot have acted in his role as a federal officer with respect to any efforts to influence, interfere with, disrupt, oversee, or change state elections."

 

[Varysblackfyre321]

Apologies if I posted this previously—but this guy seems to give good case on the lack of legal grounds for a lot of the transphobic legislation and the danger framing it as some form of compromise(as that would imply trans people are getting something out of it instead just losing decades long protections).

Reading his article on these gentleman’s transphobes line of rhetoric I’m reminded of Lindsey Graham’s attempts to frame a national abortion at 15 weeks as a reasonable compromise.

Specifically invoking some developed countries supposedly having that as a cut off and not including necessary (that there are usually a lot of exceptions, easier access to contraption, tax-funded Abortions), that make clear what he wants is much more extreme.

[Larry of the Lawn]

One nice thing not checking into Twitter the last few months is not having to read a bunch of Dem leaning pundits tell me how great the economy is and how inflation isn't bad even though everything costs 30% more than it did three years ago.  I get that's not Biden's fault but don't treat me like a fucking idiot.  The 'economy' being 'good' has zero correlation to the struggles of the bulk of the country to have any kind of financial security.  

 

 

Edited September 9, 2023 by Larry of the Lawn

[mcbigski]

1 hour ago, Larry of the Lawn said:

One nice thing not checking into Twitter the last few months is not having to read a bunch of Dem leaning pundits tell me how great the economy is and how inflation isn't bad even though everything costs 30% more than it did three years ago.  I get that's not Biden's fault but don't treat me like a fucking idiot. 

 

Whose fault is it?  

Seems to me that increasing the supply of dollars while restricting the production of energy has to lead to inflation.  Not to say Biden is wholly responsible himself.  (Heck I wonder if he can wipe his own ass some days.)

But if you're not blaming Biden, whose fault is it?

 

[Wilbur]

14 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

Whose fault is it?  

Seems to me that increasing the supply of dollars while restricting the production of energy has to lead to inflation.  Not to say Biden is wholly responsible himself.  (Heck I wonder if he can wipe his own ass some days.)

But if you're not blaming Biden, whose fault is it?

 

It's Bush's fault.  $450 billion in TARP cash sloshing around in the pockets of the banksters means that there is a whole lot of cash chasing too few goods, especially after the JIT supply chain FUBAR during Covid.

Any time you think, "Wow, that costs a lot more than it used to!" just blame the bank bailout for turning the value of the US dollar to crap.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

7 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

It's Bush's fault.  $450 billion in TARP cash sloshing around in the pockets of the banksters means that there is a whole lot of cash chasing too few goods, especially after the JIT supply chain FUBAR during Covid.

Any time you think, "Wow, that costs a lot more than it used to!" just blame the bank bailout for turning the value of the US dollar to crap.

I wouldn't put it all on that. Economist across the spectrum were saying it was a terrible idea to cut taxes and do nothing about the expected inflation in 2018. Then the pandemic happened compounded by the supply chain issues and here we are. It still blows my mind Republicans are viewed as being better on the economy when most of the data says the exact opposite.

Again, your average American isn't very bright. 

[mcbigski]

46 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

It's Bush's fault.  $450 billion in TARP cash sloshing around in the pockets of the banksters means that there is a whole lot of cash chasing too few goods, especially after the JIT supply chain FUBAR during Covid.

Any time you think, "Wow, that costs a lot more than it used to!" just blame the bank bailout for turning the value of the US dollar to crap.

So the inflation over the last 2-3 years is because of Bush circa 2007?

Got to say, I was expecting a dumb response.  But you exceeded expectations by at least 2 sigmas.

[horangi]

2 hours ago, mcbigski said:

Whose fault is it?  

Seems to me that increasing the supply of dollars while restricting the production of energy has to lead to inflation.  Not to say Biden is wholly responsible himself.  (Heck I wonder if he can wipe his own ass some days.)

But if you're not blaming Biden, whose fault is it?

 

I know you are not really looking for a rational response, but I will try anyways.  Larry's comment is totally valid in that the average individual is going to feel the pinch no matter what and its perfectly reasonable for them to be less then enthused.  That said, when evaluating the effectiveness of policy choices, it does make sense to consider the alternative outcomes, and in this case, we have a lot of other countries we can use in comparison (recognizing the huge advantage the US has with the dollar being the primary reserve currency).  Look at our brethren across the pond in the UK who got both austerity AND terrible inflation, which has still not abated.  Its not like any other country with a modern economy is just floating through the crisis as if nothing happened. Check out the OECD stats for inflation overall:

https://data.oecd.org/price/inflation-cpi.htm

When lightning strikes your house (e.g. a pandemic), you rate the fire department on their ability to respond quickly and effectively.  You don't blame them for the lightning causing a fire in the first place.  Barring some philosopher king savant of the ages, inflation was coming one way or the other, the main policy problem was trying to manage how long it would last and addressing the economic and social welfare consequences of addressing it.  Sometimes the best case scenario, when the state has chosen mostly the optimal options, is 'embrace the suck.' 

[Varysblackfyre321]

Elon Musk free speech absolutist  is really scared of being transparent on how rampant Nazi shit is on his site.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-08/musk-s-x-sues-california-over-content-moderation-legislation

This is after he accused the ADL—of lying about the increase of bigoted and even Nazi shit.

 

[BigFatCoward]

6 hours ago, mcbigski said:

So the inflation over the last 2-3 years is because of Bush circa 2007?

Got to say, I was expecting a dumb response.  But you exceeded expectations by at least 2 sigmas.

You know there is inflation everywhere right? You aren't cut off from the rest of the world (no matter how much we all wish you were sometimes). 

The us is actually doing much better than Europe in this regard. 

Edited September 9, 2023 by BigFatCoward

[IheartIheartTesla]

I thought it was pretty well established the reasons for inflation around the world came from high gas prices, the war in Ukraine, supply chain issues emanating from Covid (some of these factors cant be entirely decoupled from each other), and yes, some of it from the money given out by the government while the pandemic was happening. Only the last one can be ascribed to Biden's policies, and there are economists like Summers who felt the government largesse was way more than it should have been....but others disagree. 

Apropos of nothing, watching that interview between Jon Stewart and Summers was a thing of beauty.

[Rippounet]

9 hours ago, mcbigski said:

So the inflation over the last 2-3 years is because of Bush circa 2007?

Got to say, I was expecting a dumb response.  But you exceeded expectations by at least 2 sigmas.

Technically, you can only get a dumb answer to what is a dumb question.

The inflation that is now beginning is not something you can understand with the dominant economic theories only, so I reckon you (mcbigski) are unlikely to accept the answer.
The heart of it is that infinite growth in a finite world is impossible, so absent a technological miracle (which did not happen), there was always going to be a combination of recession and inflation on the horizon. Thing is, it wasn't supposed to be a bad thing: "recession" was going to mean less work for everybody, and "inflation" would have meant less stuff being made, but of a much higher quality.
This was actually predicted in the 20th century, including by people who knew what they were talking about, like Keynes. It's both funny and sad to "remember" that in the 1960s, people believed that by the early 2000s, most of us would be working far less, perhaps something like 20 hours a week or so...
But no one really modeled what was going to happen in purely economic terms, so when the first signs of this transition to a "post-growth economy" came knocking in the 1970s, with a combination of market saturation in developed countries and the oil crises, the reaction was absurd. The big problem that had really not been considered was that a "rational" economy would not -could not- have growing profits. Profit is many things (it can be defined in many different ways), but one thing that is clear is that you can only make a lot of profit on an economic activity that is seen as valuable (duh), by that I mean that is either truly essential to society (like rebuilding Europe after WW2, or developing Asian countries), or excitingly original and possibly leading to genuine social progress (some of the internet stuff). In a country where everyone is already content with what they have and society is somewhat organized to help develop individual autonomy, high margins of profit are really a liability: they reduce the sharing of added-value between the worker and the manager/capitalist (thus impacting demand), and they keep increasing the money supply, thus leading to inflation without growth ("stagflation").
Point is, in hindsight, we now know that back in the 1970s (/early 1980s), there should have been a lot more regulation in developed countries to diminish profit. There was less need to produce stuff (all households were well equiped), so there was less work to be done, so people should have been paid more for less hours. And it was clear that energy was actually limited as well, so either we should have massively switched to nuclear energy, or we should have made less stuff, but much more durable/repairable - both, ideally, because nuclear energy isn't without risks. In a nutshell, finance itself should have been killed, because investment was no longer necessary... Save perhaps for sectors that were not -in a rational world- destined for profit, like improved healthcare or spatial exploration.
But just as all this was about to happen (or at least, was being discussed)... corporations took over our governments. Sometimes by directly buying uh financing the campaigns of politicians, sometimes by "convincing" them through a load of fake economic studies leading to bogus theories ("voodoo economics," as Bush Sr said). So, instead of accepting the inevitable and desirable falling rates of profit, everything was done to prevent that from happening. Deregulation, branding, planned obsolescence, destroying unions, to make sure everyone would keep producing/working/consuming like crazy... And instead of going for low-energy production, globalisation relied on moving economic activity where the profits could remain high, even if it meant that factories would be moved from one developing country to the next over time, with distribution relying on international transportation. And even that wasn't enough, so capital also relied on constant over-valuation of economic activity, especially "innovative" ones such as the "virtual economy" (i.e. internet stuff) and finance (which is basically making money with money, i.e. magic thinking with numbers).
It was absolutely and totally nuts, the worst possible answer to what wasn't even an actual problem. But in hindsight, it also seems inevitable, because the dominant ideology ("liberal-developmental" as historian Emily Rosenberg has called it) indirectly relied on growth: it was believed that economic liberty (especially entrepreneurship) was a necessary condition for democracy and individual freedom, and that any attempt to deny the private property of the means of production was the beginning of a slide toward totalitarianism - Stalinism. So of course, even though it would have been rational to accept an end to growth and profits, no one knew what that entailed. "Counter-culture" (broadly defined) scared the shit out of most people. Funnily enough, the US and France were the two countries were this was the most apparent: faced with the prospect of a different kind of society thanks to movements for more social justice, with significantly more individual freedoms and an evolving set of morals, populations reflexively flocked to the traditional sense of morality ("law and order" politics), with its reassuring imperative of work. The "conservative revolutions" that took place during the 1970s and 1980s prevented our societies from transitioning to a post-growth economic structure, thus paving the way for "neo-liberalism" as we know it: runaway energy consumption despite peak oil having been reached which means having to rush to develop renewables or nuclear energy, superfluous production of short-lived technological "gadgets," an anomalously large money supply that keeps generating bubbles, and a slow slide into authoritarianism in the face of (or because of, ironically) growing popular resentment due to the destruction of the blue-collar middle-class.
More importantly, when it comes to "inflation," you now have an abundance of factors that will make it terrible and permanent: lack of "cheap" energy to be found for production, difficulties to maintain the production and distribution lines (because of climatic and geopolitical events), lack of relative purchasing power for the working-class, continuous profit-seeking through Maximising Shareholder Value... etc.

So if you ask "whose fault is it?" that's a tough one to answer, because it is impossible to blame any individual or individuals for this mess. It's everyone and no one at the same time, though some people were in fact more responsible than others (see Nancy MacLean's Democracy in chains). The only thing I would say we know for certain is that it'd be best to stop looking for people to blame, and wonder how we can bring back production to levels that correspond to the physical reality of our planet. Because right now, laissez-faire economics only knows how to do that through poverty - i.e. runaway inflation.
It's ironic that so many people refuse the radical propositions of the degrowth movement, and yet fail to realize that it's going to happen anyway, and refusing to think about "post-growth societies" only means you're choosing poverty for the vast majority as the answer to the original problem - which, again, is that the planet is not infinite.
 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

35 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

and yes, some of it from the money given out by the government while the pandemic was happening. Only the last one can be ascribed to Biden's policies

The money given to the poor, working and middle classes was entirely necessary. Did some people abuse the program? Sure. That always happens and is not a justification for doing nothing. But the anger should be directed at the wealthy who really abused these programs. The reporting on what some of the super wealthy did (and elected officials especially) is appalling. 

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Apropos of nothing, watching that interview between Jon Stewart and Summers was a thing of beauty.

Got a link, or did I miss a previous one in the thread?

[IheartIheartTesla]

To be honest, i've probably watched it piecemeal from FB, but if you have Apple TV then you should be able to access "The problem with Jon Stewart". Alternately, there may be a way to access it going down the youtube rabbit hole; for instance: 

Edit: Regarding the government response I mean some claim the amount given was more than necessary, although that could mean either capping it at a lower salary, or giving less to everyone. Summers is one of those 'some people'

Edited September 9, 2023 by IheartIheartTesla

[Zorral]

From the WaPo's latest "Deep Reads":

Jan. 6 shattered her family. Now they’re trying to forgive.
Peyton Reffitt has watched her family come apart after her father joined the Capitol riot mob. Now she and her family are confronting the perceived betrayals and broken relationships.

If any of us still wonder whether this is or is not a religious cult:

"For the sentencing, Peyton wrote a letter to the judge asking for leniency and saying the former president had led her father astray. When Trump spoke, she wrote, her father “fell to his knees.” "

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2023/jan-6-reffitt-family-repair-relationships?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f002

The article reveals too that this particular fellow was a member of the  3 Percenters, those who insist the War of Independence was a fake because only three percent of the colonists wanted independence Britain's monarchy.  Looks as though falling to one's knees before one's betters was bred in his bones.

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.... Guy received 87 months in prison, the most of any Jan. 6 defendant up to that point. His case was “very different from all others prosecuted to date,” the judge said, since he took on a “self-appointed leadership role” and had a firearm at the Capitol.

Outside the courthouse, Nicole told reporters that she and her husband were patriots. Sarah said it was unfair that Trump still could run for president while their father was going to prison.

Peyton hadn’t planned to speak to the news media, but then she impulsively began.

“Trump deserves life in prison if my father is in prison for this long,” she said of the former president, who has since been indicted four times, including on charges related to Jan. 6.  ....

Ya, let's find common ground:

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.... The sisters told people online that their father was not abusive and that they forgave their brother. Strangers on those sites said the sisters were defending a terrorist, while others threatened to kill their brother. Some also said they wanted to sexually assault Peyton and her sister.

“They just want us to pick a side,” Sarah said of the people online. “It’s so stupid that it has to be political. It has nothing to do with politics at this point for us. We just want to have our family back.” ....

 

BTW, their father came back from the siege at the Capitol and said if they said anything about him being there, they would be killed.

Edited September 9, 2023 by Zorral