ProfessorPlum
ProfessorPlum's JournalCenk explains why Clinton not debating in CA is the sign of a terrible candidate
He lays out why Clinton should be _rushing_ to be on TV. It is a chance to praise Sanders, attack Trump, and get a ton of free air time. Oh, and also another opportunity to be more than a slimy politician who breaks promises. Cenk is right, of course, and this demonstrates once again what poor decisions she continues to make as a candidate.
Say what you will about Clinton, but she rigged the hell out of the machine
I'm not very keen on Clinton era policies, especially the ones that hobbled welfare, allowed telecommunications to coalesce around the wealthiest, deregulated banking, and demanded the continuing silence of gay military personnel.
And, I think this country needs to get back to FDR-style, New Deal regulations and social policy. Big time. As quickly as possible.
And so, my support for Sanders in the primary was a foregone conclusion. As I've watched him go from nearly-unknown to a candidate who will command very nearly half of the pledged delegates at the convention, I'm pleased at the way he has highlighted the need for more social justice and less income inequality, more banking regulation, more opportunities for young people.
But I have to say, I'm even more in awe of the way that Clinton and the Clinton organization rigged the living shit out of this election, to the point where there was never a chance for an upstart contender like Sanders.
She pre-bribed the state DNC organizations and the superdelegates with her technically-legal kickback scheme for donations from the super wealthy. She contrived to coordinate a debate schedule with her flunky at the head of the DNC which guaranteed low viewership, stacking the deck for her front-runner advantage. She pre-bribed herself by accepting huge personal gifts from the economic masters of the country, guaranteeing that they understood where her allegiance lay. She has taken advantage of the corporate media's absolute bias towards the status quo to praise and perpetuate the status quo. Her connections to foreign governments, corporate power, and celebrity were all greased by the Clinton Foundation, to ensure the corrupt system that the elite will find her palatable.
She entered the race as the 800-pound gorilla, and has used the corruption of the system to maintain that advantage fairly well.
She left nothing to chance this time around. The upstarts, like one-term senator Barack Obama, would get no breathing room, and the entire DNC apparatus would be rigged against them and for her.
It speaks to a certain ruthless, crushing, determination that her will be done, no matter the will of the electorate. And skill at organization, consensus building, coercion, glad-handing and strong-arming.
Say what you will about Clinton, but she rigged the hell out of this corrupt, fetid, money-worshipping machine that is our electoral process.
At least we will get a candidate that has some skill at thinking ahead, using power and money to get her way, and knows how to move among the elite to achieve some things (even if it is stamping down on the democratizing spirit of the country).
Conservatives absolutely INSIST on living in a world of lies
From one of the best and most insightful bloggers around (The Slacktivist), comes a brief deconstruction of Rod Dreher's recent, laughably impossible story of gangs of transsexuals menacing the populace:
The story is not true. The story is flagrantly and extravagantly not true. It involves a swarm of “men in their early 30s who were obviously transgendered” harassing women and children in line at a suburban Texas movie theater where Dreher’s friend — a conservative “tough Texas chick” and apparent expert on visual gender identification — was taking her son to see Captain America: Civil War. More “transgenders” arrive, then still more, cutting in line and bullying everyone around them with crude language and sex talk to aggressively show everyone in Texas that roving transgender gangs are now in charge of law and culture and daily life in Texas.
And it’s all utter bullshit. None of this happened. The Bad Jackie of the tough Texas suburbs — if any such person really exists — is making stuff up. And she’s so focused on making her story shocking that she forgot to make any of it plausible. None of this would be believable even if she’d made this a story about taking her son to a midnight showing of Rocky Horror in Provincetown.
So is the devout and pious Mr. Dreher lying? Or is he just credulously passing along an obvious lie without feeling any compunction to examine this false witness against his neighbors first?
Doesn’t matter. That’s not interesting. “Religious conservative bears false witness against sexual minorities” isn’t news. That’s a dog-bites-man story.
What is interesting is that Rod Dreher wants this story to be true. He presents this fantasy as a nightmare, as a horror show that he condemns, but none of that purported revulsion quite manages to cover up his desperate longing to have stories like this be real. If one shows him otherwise — proves that the monster under the bed does not exist, he would not find that reassuring, but upsetting. It would make him sad, and angry, and disappointed.
...
The current trans-panic, like the earlier Satanic panic it imitates, isn’t mainly a matter of misinformation that misleads the credulous. It’s a fantasy that its proponents want and desire to be true despite, on some fundamental level, already knowing that it’s not. They need it to be true because it provides the basis for their identity as the special people, the extraordinarily virtuous, the heroes and champions of righteousness. Take away the fantasy story and what does that make them? They can’t bear to think about that. And so they won’t.
Independent voters are chumps
For a long time I've been trying to figure out how Sanders can get people so excited, pull big crowds, generate so much interest and passion, and then get beaten by Clinton at the polls. The phenomenon continues right to this day.
The only thing I can figure out is that a lot of attendees of his rallies, the people very excited by him, are independents, Republicans, or in some other way not affiliated with the Democratic party. So, they have a candidate they support, and want him to be the Democratic nominee, but apart from donating money or canvassing, they can't affect the vote - they can't vote for the candidate they support.
Republicans, well, I can understand. They are not well informed to begin with, so if a Sanders message resonates with them they are clearly in the wrong party.
But independents who like Sanders' message . . . they are deliberately dis-empowering themselves by not being members of the only party where that message can come from. They have to watch the parade go by.
Meanwhile, Democrats themselves are busy nominating the weaker candidate. Also bizarre to me, but then what do I know. In any event, by not belonging to the Democratic party (mostly due to the Democrats not fighting for the people), those independents shoot themselves right in the foot.
Stephen King got it right:
Trump for president is like watching The Dead Zone play out in real life.
Look, everybody! A horserace!
Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, can you feel the excitement? Can you feel the excitement of talking about Clinton versus Trump? We have six months to talk about it but I just can't wait to start talking about it. They are so exciting. What's he going to say? I'll bet it will be outrageous. What's SHE going to say in response? Who is going to WIN? Who is going to score rhetorical points? Omigosh, I could just pee myself with excitement.
The moment Sanders drops out or concedes, the plight of the poor, the workers, the union-less, the unemployed . .. their concerns will be consumed in the fire of this mindless babble. Sanders is trying to keep our minds focused on what is important to the people of this country - not which of the two very well-heeled horseys will win the race. His senatorial posts on Facebook last night were right on point, continuing to drive his message of economic equality home. He was talking about climate change, the corrupting influence of fossil fuel money, the retirement crisis. Those issues go right down the toilet once the horse race begins. By delaying the start of that stupid "conversation", Sanders is doing everyone a huge favor.
run, Bernie, run
One of the most chilling details in Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine",
which is chock-full of chilling details, is the social engineering done on South American nations in the 1970s that are stripped of their socialist democratic governments and replaced by tender mercies of the American capitalists and their fascist allies. In Chile, in Argentina, in Bolivia, big business and the United States government destroy the social fabric of their societies and replace it with political repression, torture, militarized enforcement, rapacious and unfettered capitalism.
In order to keep this regime in place, these governments need to destroy people who would help the poor, who encourage others to be kind to their fellow humans, who are humanists and humanitarians and kind-hearted clerics. The people of these countries are encouraged to turn on, and turn in, the people among them who are the best of humanity, who feed the hungry and clothe the sick, who care about workers oppressed into wage slavery, who stand up against this crush of capital.
It was horrible to read about, and I can only imagine how horrible it must have been to live through. To basically have all the good, and kind, and caring people in your society bullied into silence, or tortured, or killed, to keep them for sticking up for each other and everyone else.
And while I don't want to draw the analogy too far . . . this is just a primary race after all, and one where the person who wins is likely to be the person who was likely to win from the very beginning . . . I would caution my fellow humans and DUers about the tone with which we treat the goals of helping our fellow citizens. And the tone with which we treat politicians that embody and encourage those goals.
Sanders has a history of fighting for social justice, of not "playing the game" of the rest of corrupted Washington, of setting an example of standing up to the corporate powers and creating an atmosphere of solidarity for Americans to copy and thrive in.
He is to be admired for his stances, and especially for his trying to turn the race into a contest of who can treat their fellow Americans better. That is a contest that everyone would win.
This ugly mocking of him for tilting against the corrupt windmill of our government and the rot at the top of the Democratic party - for daring to challenge the establishment - chills me. It echos the persecution of the humanitarians in South America, of the practitioners of social justice, and the causes of kindness and fairness.
Sanders' fight for the nomination may ultimately fail . . but his ideas are best handled with reverence and respect. For they encompass the treatment that we would all wish to have from our countrymen and women.
"The Shock Doctrine" is a must-read for everyone on Democratic Underground.
How do you create more business investment? Raise taxes on businesses
I recently was talking to a friend who has a successful small business about his tax returns. He said his returns show very little (net) income from his business, even though it is thriving, because he invests most of its income into the business itself. It allows him to grow his business, while keeping his taxes low.
Which got me to thinking, that this is why the argument for lower business taxes is all wrong. Most times, supply siders will say that if you lower business taxes, businesses will have lots more money to invest in themselves, and you'll create growth and investment and the result will be jobs jobs jobs.
But that's exactly the opposite of what is true - if you crank up taxation rates, but allow businesses to avoid taxes by investing in their own growth, _that_ is how you drive more investment and build up your business economy and infrastructure.
It's just another example, once again, of how completely ass-backwards everything about trickle down economics is. They say something is true when the exact opposite is true, and then just shovel money at people who are already rich. It comes down to a bunch of lies and handwaving to just reward the already rich and powerful.
Sanders will be tied or ahead of Clinton at convention?,
So, I'm reading this article, https://johnlaurits.com/2016/04/28/this-is-what-will-happen-at-the-democratic-convention/
which makes the case that Bernie could plausibly be ahead in pledged delegates by the convention, based on his past performance in western states.
No wonder Clinton so desperately wants him to concede / drop out now.
How about everyone chill out and let's see what happens? Things are about to get interesting...
When are we ever, as a people, going to start to _try_ to make this country less miserable
and a happier place to live?
We slave away, with little to no vacation, we pay the equivalent of the cost of a very expensive new car for every kids' education (or the cost of a house, depending on where they go), our economic lives are ruined if we get sick, our rich commit crimes with no consequence, and our corporations write the rules that govern our daily existence.
Meanwhile, in France, Germany, Scandinavia, and many other places, people are much more free to pursue their happiness, raise their families, have excellent educations, and simply _exist_ without having to go begging to their corporate overlords at every turn.
The slavery mindset that is this country's original sin has never left our bloodstream, from the desire for cheap/free/forced labor that fires every employer's imagination, to the servile mentality of our workers.
Cmon, let's stand up on our hind legs and demand better. The humans and the pigs are getting harder and harder to tell apart.
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