Yep. I mean, I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve only seen super-racist people being super-racist a million times. Not real evidence for racism, right? After all, I’m a woman, so what do I know… /s
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You should read more than headlines. The body of any article is more informative.
Moving goal posts again huh? I present evidence and even show how your evidence is being presented in a slanted manner by you and you simply say I have no evidence. I can’t take you seriously. Sorry, You just don’t have what it takes to have a reasonable online discussion.
Your attempts to gaslight everyone who saw what happened is too sad to bother with anymore.
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There are rules written somewhere which say that governments can do this, but in practice they don’t have the power to. Governments are heavily lobbied and influenced to advance a neoliberal agenda. If some politicians dispute the agenda, new politicians can be backed with virtually limitless wealth. And if entire governments cease to cooperate, they are punished or if necessary, replaced.
This is not to say that neoliberalism is an invincible conspiracy. But the trouble is that government is a concentrated source of power which can be easily captured by those with godlike amounts of capital. Lobbyists, think tanks, journalists, lawyers, mercenaries…all of these things are for sale, and can easily be focused against the small number of bureaucrats and politicians who do the work of governance.
Any opposition to this system can’t come through the mechanisms of bureaucracy and politics, because those systems have been “solved for” by global capital. Opposition must come through the direct power of the people of the world. If we want to be free in this new world, we need to stop expecting a government to represent us. We all have to take power ourselves.
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Do you have a link?
It’s right next door, dude.
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A well regulated capitalism, one that is subservient to the needs of the environment that makes human happiness possible, is the most efficient resource allocation mechanism possible at global (or even national) scale.
Step one, any product that is created in violation of US environmental and worker protection laws should be subject to massive US tariffs, that make it very very slightly cheaper for these goods to be produced in US factories by US workers. Step two, all externalized costs (pollution for example) are reimposed on producers in the form of taxation. That’s a level playing field, a free and fair market, and that’s what America needs.
If I could get votes for this, I wouldn’t care who the votes were coming from. I’ll take support from racists, furries, plushies, neocons, LGBT folk, fundamentalists, even Unitarians and Quakers 
. Those constituencies must not be permitted to add their own riders to the program, but it’s critically important that I do not add my own, either - the point is common ground not ideological dominance. If I throw in any stance on gun control, abortion policy, or the death penalty I lose. I need the votes from both sides of all three of those issues, and I can’t afford to lose any of them.
That’s how you win. Build coalitions with mutually agreeable goals and burn all purity tests. Put aside differences with the understanding that they can be pursued after all common goals are achieved.
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The grass is always greener?
I vote Medievalist as Trump’s economic advisor, though I’m not sure you’d like your boss.
Plus, I had to comment because of your Avatar!
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I’m down with the coalition stuff for sure. But unfortunately that vision of the future, in which capitalism is wisely and justly regulated, is a fantasy.
The US government does not tolerate the erosion of its sovereignty and destruction of its industrial base because it wants to. It allows it because it must. It is held hostage by international capital, which could abandon the entire country just as easily as your tariffs are implemented.
Look at Greece, which recently overwhelmingly elected a socialist, anti-globalization government. That government is useless, flailing in the face of the reality: there’s little to nothing they can do. Their own economy is beyond the control of their entire national government.
If regulation could work, believe that I would work towards regulation. It simply won’t work. What we need is a radical re-imagining of authority and economics that puts power directly in the hands of all of us.
From what I’ve seen over 30 years of adult life this is not true. What they do is purchase the loyalty of key individuals and organizations. Big money in the U.S. does not do tacky, potentially dangerous hostage taking. Threats and hostage taking are a game they play with the truly weak, like Greece. The U.S. is ~6% of the world by population and in the low 20%s by economic activity. Co-opting the elite (who works for the Carlyle group among our former leaders, eh?) and simple bribery (who gets berths at the best funded think tanks after leaving government positions?) is the way the game is played.
These sanitized methods are insidious and very much harder to attack than simple hostage-taking.
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Source?
It would make sense to me that many of the same people who voted for Obama also voted for Trump. Although it’s debatable whether or not he was actually an anti-establishment candidate, he was seen as such in 2008. The same is true for Trump in 2016. Clinton in 2016 is much like Romney in 2012: a coastal elite who doesn’t care about the flyover states or the people in them, and barely bothers to pander.
I’m not sure who would vote for John Kerry, so I can’t comment.
It honestly would surprise me that someone who voted for Bill Clinton and/or Al Gore would vote against Hillary Clinton, because they’re all cut from the same cloth. However, there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then.
Understandable, and I’m not defending Trump voters at all. However, as someone who agonized over a Clinton vote for months, I understand that there’s more to it than just racism. Why Trump won and why Clinton lost are two related but separate issues, and they can’t be answered in the same way.
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I basically agree. Capitalism is a dang good system, but it needs checks and balances to protect people from the worst elements of it. Basically, the idea is to tolerate some market inefficiency (taxation) so that those who benefit the most from capitalism can shore up those who benefit the least. Certain things should NOT be entirely free markets (food, fuel, technology, education…).
But, with Randian desciples writing the next budget, I think the free market has enough defenders in positions of power today.
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You are repeating the same rebuttal over and over again, and you have been for the last 180 posts or so. Either put in the effort to make an actual argument that doesn’t end with “conspiracy theory”, or take a break from the internet for the rest of the day.
You are no longer adding anything new to this topic, and are actively degrading it at this point. There is a fine line between what you are currently doing and driving trollies.
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Yeah, good point. Sadly, I agree. From my perspective there will be no significant positive changes, nor would there have been any under Clinton. The 1% only want the appearance of a free market, not anything resembling a fair one.
And that’s where, despite my mild disagreements with @zikzak about what is and isn’t actually possible, I’d still vote for him rather than anyone acceptable to the corporate-owned major parties.
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I think you have already done that without any help from me.
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Invariably, commentators on the losing side of an election say that if only the candidates had espoused the policies of the commentator, they would have won the election. But that is just more epistemic closure, this time believing that the issues important to you must be the issues important to everyone else.
In California, Clinton beat Sanders 56% - 43%. In New York, she beat him 58% - 42%. Clinton was the clear, unambiguous choice of Democratic voters in Democratic primaries. She may not have been your choice. But that does not mean she was the wrong choice. It is easily possible that Candidate Sanders would have lost to Trump by a larger margin than Clinton did. But it is definitely true that Sanders lost to Clinton. Transitivity doesn’t have to apply, but it doesn’t not have to apply either.
Incidentally, Trump did not call all Hispanics rapists. He limited that insult to illegal Mexican immigrants. So when Cubans in Florida voted for Trump, maybe they didn’t care about Mexicans, and maybe they did care that President Obama normalized relations with Cuba.
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Sanders lost to Clinton because mass media colluded to avoid giving his campaign any but the minimum publicity. Even with 44% of the vote he’d only get one throwaway line in a day’s news, framing him as a fringe candidate such as Stein and Johnson. Being dismissed as “unelectable” in most media, from beginning to end of the campaign, regardless of the real amount of interest obviously doesn’t do anybody’s campaign any favors. Ideally I would say that elections shouldn’t be giant media circuses, but they currently are, and the circus and DNC went out of their way to prevent media discourse of Sanders as any sort of valid candidate. But he did remarkably well, considering the very real obstacles put into place.
But this was already talked to death around the time of the primaries. So anybody who thinks that story is relevant now would do well to search and refer to those discussions.
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This is muddying how much pundits and opinion pieces make up media thanks to the proliferation of corporate and entertainment news online and off.
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Well, of course.
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Yup, there’s our election results.
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