mags wrote:

innervisionscm wrote:

The Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Obama neoliberalism has destroyed the country and has come under fire from both left and right, and it will not be able to hold power for much longer. Defeating Trump is not just about this election, but about the future Trumps that will emerge 4, 8, and 12 years from now. Those efforts to fend off future fascism need to start now, and while I prefer focusing on popular movements and building institutional power through unions and the media, it might be a good use of your time to consider Stein, depending where you live and how her campaign turns out.

That's a stretch, a blanket misstatement.....Not good and definitely not true to generalize, to lump all of them together

I'm pretty sure IV knows of the differences of those governments, cabinets and their ideologies but there's little doubt that the US' overall neoliberal current was imposed during the reigns of the listed presidents. Obama might be not as enthusiastic about or even opposed to some of these policies but in eight years he was either unwilling or unable to initiate the Change (TM) he was babbling about in his earlier days, and for some of them especially the drone usage and renewed or novel military adventures he has to be made accountable for.

Kel Varnsen wrote:

Democrats had a good chance of responding to many of the problems in the US, but they blew it. Instead of going for Sanders, who is a good guy with a lot of good ideas, they went with a corrupt, hawkish and professional politican who probably don't give a shit about the average american.

Who the fuck are you?

What neo-liberalism current?
You mean the one that was put in place with FDR?
Okay, that was liberalism, no neo....
And disappeared with Carter?
Or turn of the century progressives with Teddy R?
If they have to be labeled, I call them under currents...And as such, were mostly out of sight during R-B1-Clinton-B2...
The era of gross materialism....

Obama does not "babble"...He presents his positions after much thought, discussion...Right or wrong...

mags wrote:

innervisionscm wrote:

The Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Obama neoliberalism has destroyed the country and has come under fire from both left and right, and it will not be able to hold power for much longer. Defeating Trump is not just about this election, but about the future Trumps that will emerge 4, 8, and 12 years from now. Those efforts to fend off future fascism need to start now, and while I prefer focusing on popular movements and building institutional power through unions and the media, it might be a good use of your time to consider Stein, depending where you live and how her campaign turns out.

That's a stretch, a blanket misstatement.....Not good and definitely not true to generalize, to lump all of them together

There's no meaningful difference in how Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton 1, Bush 2, Obama, and Clinton 2 use the state to manage the economy. They differ on social issues like gay rights and abortion rights but that's about it.

It really started with the latter Carter years at the end of the 70s. The response to worldwide overcapacity in manufacturing, which, in addition to the oil shocks, produced a long recession, was to empower the finance class to extract capital from the less profitable manufacturing sector (and from the public sector) and invest it elsewhere at a higher rate of return. If you look at the economic advisors of each of these presidents, they're all from the same school of thinking. Their policies are working toward the same goal.

Now, of course, the financiers didn't use that capital to create the economy of the future, but instead created a pattern of deindustrialization, rolling back of public services, and enormous, unstable debt bubbles, which served to empower a metropolitan elite at the expense of the rest of the country. So people are angry. You have non-metropolitan workers who have lost their jobs (which, in America, means your community falls apart), you have young university graduates (myself included!) with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and poor job prospects relative to their education, and you have an immiserated underclass (often black and brown) which, beyond the brutality of the criminal justice system, receives basically nothing from the state.

This pattern cannot continue, bottom line. This election, even in the very likely case that Hillary wins, has shown that there will be a paradigm shift in the very near future. The question in the American context is whether you get a kind of multi-racial social democracy or an ethno-nationalist, law-and-order authoritarianism. You're not going to be able to sell liberals like Clinton or Obama eight years from now, people are struggling and want a change.

Sums him up doesn't it.

33% of the time spent applauding

Jeb Bush would kill for that

innervisionscm wrote:

With the electoral college it's only an important election in a handful of states though. I live in Illinois which is hard blue and don't feel the need to pull the lever for the disaster that is Hillary Clinton. In those states which are firmly red or blue (the majority) you can think more seriously about third parties or not voting without making Trump any more likely.

I'm not a fan of the Green Party really, I think it's a poorly run opportunist party that distracts from more important goals, but if they get 5% nationally they get public campaign funding. Depending on how much momentum Stein can get that could be a goal worth working toward.

The Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Obama neoliberalism has destroyed the country and has come under fire from both left and right, and it will not be able to hold power for much longer. Defeating Trump is not just about this election, but about the future Trumps that will emerge 4, 8, and 12 years from now. Those efforts to fend off future fascism need to start now, and while I prefer focusing on popular movements and building institutional power through unions and the media, it might be a good use of your time to consider Stein, depending where you live and how her campaign turns out.

Agreed for the most part, except I feel it is an important election across the entire nation. It has to be proven, glaringly, that America is not ready or willing to accommodate a candidate like Trump. This would help encourage the Republican party to readdress its own rhetoric and positions as well.

He must be handily defeated. Can't be just a race to 270. 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/ivanka-trumps-best-selling-fashion-line-is-manufactured-in-china-and-vietnam-a7153376.html

not that I fault him, but it does make for funny reading.

Qwiss! wrote:

flobaba wrote:

This would help encourage the Republican party to readdress its own rhetoric and positions as well.

No chance of that. They are already more extreme than Trump in most areas.

They are more extreme in terms of their brand of conservatism, but Trump is a strong-man style fascist that doesn't dress it up at personal liberties or what-have-you. I mean, he wants to strengthen the authority of the federal government from the supposed state-rights small government party. He wants to do it, though, because he'd be the one in charge. 

I think it's kind of important to beat him by as much as possible. 

Firstly, I'd say there's no compelling evidence by my lights that Trump would actually pursue a more minimalist foreign policy. I think those decisions are driven by forces beyond the Presidency and I think Trump lacks the institutional base to resist advice.

What would happen is that every foreign policy action would be accompanied by a greater degree of bombast.

But the real threat from the guy is the social forces his election would mobilise, that his campaign has already mobilised, and the difficulty of the US digesting that toxic cocktail of nationalism, chauvinism and misogyny that's poured into the national discourse.

We've seen it all over the world—once popular right rhetoric gets a seat in the national debate its poisonous ideas get integrated into the platforms of the political mainstream as well. So you get UK Labour under Ed Miliband carrying on about "strong controls on migration", and so on.

A Trump Presidency would be a diffuse shitshow with a huge problem around emboldening the alt-right tendencies that are already there, dormant but awakening, throughout the entire American political fabric. Imagine all those faux-progressive Silicon Valley billionaires cosying up to a guy who demands racially profiled migration instead of Obama, trying to extract profit from new arrangements with the state. Quite scary.

Trump would focus, primarily, on making himself look good (in the way he thinks he looks "good"). He'd deny decisions were made by others, he'd justify doing things he said he wouldn't do the day before, and he'd give a voice to those who would eat that kind of shit up, namely, the toxic cocktail people of Burnsy's Trump dystopia. Any actual policy is irrelevant to him, it seems to me, whether it's dismantling American military bases in other countries, building a wall, or whatever else he claims he would do. He'd fill every gap in his ranting speeches with some platitude about how "great" it's all going.

A long way to go, but Clinton is in trouble:

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/25/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-poll/index.html

Burnwinter wrote:

But the real threat from the guy is the social forces his election would mobilise, that his campaign has already mobilised, and the difficulty of the US digesting that toxic cocktail of nationalism, chauvinism and misogyny that's poured into the national discourse.

We've seen it all over the world—once popular right rhetoric gets a seat in the national debate its poisonous ideas get integrated into the platforms of the political mainstream as well. So you get UK Labour under Ed Miliband carrying on about "strong controls on migration", and so on.

Trump is the effect, not the cause here. He is the manifestation of an angry electorate that is lashing out at immigration, free trade, lack of real income growth, multiculturalism, modernism etc. There was no way the national discourse, in France, UK, Sweden, US etc, could ever keep these things out. Politicians are now trying to adjust their positions according to the population. 

You're a mathematician Kel, so you understand partial differential equations—I would say Trump's rhetoric and statecraft are both caused by and a cause of of the social forces that are his firmest constituency.

But either way he's an amplifier of a certain dynamic relative to Clinton, and we'd see that amplification if he came to office.

I tend to agree with you about the historical nature of the current cris de coeur of the populist right all over the developed world, but they are caused by the hollowing out of the nation state as guarantor of the collective interest, itself historically determined by globalisation and the rise of the transnational corporation.

The problem with that equation is that nation states, structurally, are incapable of aggregating the power and reach needed to regulate the globalisation that has led to this withering of collective wealth, and this rising nationalism. We're going to need a new internationalism, or post-nationalism to head off a crisis.

This is a great read, as hilarious as it is tragic:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all