Blog Mirror: Debunking Myth #10: Economic growth is always good

 

Debunking Myth #10: Economic growth is always good

The 2024 Election, Part XXI. The Refusal to Face Reality Edition.

Democrats don't lose elections, they throw them away.

Yeoman.

July 10, 2024

House Democrats met privately yesterday with a majority of those who spoke expressing the opinion that Joe Biden needs to drop out of the race.  Sen. Michael Bennet became the first Senator to do the same, noting; “Donald Trump is on track, I think, to win this election, and maybe win it by a landslide, and take with him the Senate and the House"

That he get out is obvious.

Biden has defiantly been refusing to do so.  

It's nearly a symbol of his generation, one which simply won't yield when prior generations did.  This pattern repeats itself everywhere in current American society.

In other news, it was revealed that Biden cancelled an early evening meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz during the G7 conference as he had to go to bed. The same source reports that he had trouble working outside of the 10 to 4 time frame.

More locally, out of state lobbying group Make Liberty Win has been sending around mailers on candidates it endorses noting them as "100% pro gun", a pretty absurd claim in a state in which every candidate can claim the same thing. For the most part, the endorsed candidates are from the far right, with one single exception.

I looked up one candidate on their flyer that I received.  The candidate indicated that he though Reagan and Trump were the two greatest Presidents the country had ever had.  What a jarring comment. While I feel that Ronald Reagan, who was a much more cynical campaigner than people want to believe, can be blamed for the rise of the populists were now experiencing, he was a true conservative, a relatively decent President, and a necessary economic correction for the time.  He was also not afraid to use American power overseas.  Trump's a liar whose embraced populism and isolationism.  I don't really see the two of them getting along well, if they were in a private room discussing politics, or in a debate.

Congressman Hageman has indicated that she's spoken to Donald Trump about drug problems on the Wind River Reservation.  This is a topic that needs to be addressed, but it is a symptom of our current politics that an incumbent Congressman would discuss a current problem with a prospective chief executive, rather than the current one.

July 11, 2020

George Clooney wrote an op ed in The New York Times urging President Biden to drop out of the race.

I really debated posting this item here as, by and large, I really don't care what celebrities have to say about anything whatsoever.  But ultimately, I decided to note this as Clooney, who had recently held a fund raiser for Biden that Biden was at, wrote an article that was observational.  Praising Biden, whom he considers a friend, he noted:

But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time. None of us can. It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.

Was he tired? Yes. A cold? Maybe. But our party leaders need to stop telling us that 51 million people didn’t see what we just saw. We’re all so terrified by the prospect of a second Trump term that we’ve opted to ignore every warning sign. The George Stephanopoulos interview only reinforced what we saw the week before. As Democrats, we collectively hold our breath or turn down the volume whenever we see the president, whom we respect, walk off Air Force One or walk back to a mic to answer an unscripted question.

Clooney knows Biden, and he's right.  

Mostly right anyway. George F. Will's scathing article urging Biden to do the same thing, which was blunt and not kind, argued the following point:

The compassion owed to someone apparently in the cruel grip of an inexorably advancing disease that destroys selfhood should not obscure this fact: Biden’s malady is not robbing the nation of either an impressive political talent or a singularly public-spirited official. Biden was a mediocrity in his 1980s prime, when his first lunge for the presidency quickly collapsed, as his second would in 2008, and as his third almost did after he finished fifth in New Hampshire’s primary in 2020. In the office he eventually attained, he has chosen his defining legacy: the self-absorption of his refusal to leave the public stage gracefully.

Biden was only elected in 2020 as he seemed to be a safe, one term, President when it was assumed that Donald Trump would go away.  Not gracefully, but still away.  That's proven false.  Biden is four years older and no longer the hope that he once was.  Democrats have had four years to find a replacement for the aging Biden, but Biden is standing in the way, just as Trump refuses to go away and allow his party to form into something stable.

Also blistering was the article from the slightly left of center Atlantic, which noted, in an article using a Biden line as its title C'mon Man!:

Never underestimate the destructive power of a stubborn old narcissist with something to prove.

Ideally no one gets hurt along the way: Maybe grandpop refuses to give up his license, drives into an oak tree, and only the car gets totaled. But sometimes there are casualties: Maybe a pedestrian gets hit.

President Joe Biden, 81, is acting like one of history’s most negligent and pigheaded leaders at a crucial moment, and right now, we are all pedestrians. 

In contrast to this you have those Democrats boldy saying "nothing to see here".  An interesting example of that is the most recent post of Robert Reich which insists its only Democratic donors who want Biden out.

Not hardly, Bob.

cont:

The editorial board of The New York Times has declared Donald Trump "unfit to lead".

cont:

The GOP has released its platform:

2024 GOP PLATFORM

Protecting the unborn, save for banning late term abortions, long a Republican policy, is notably out of the platform this year.  A promised mass deportation figures prominently.

July 14, 2024

In one single horrific terroristic action, 20 year old Thomas Matthew Crooks almost certain guaranteed the election of Donald Trump.

Crooks attempted to murder Donald Trump yesterday.  The details are not in, no doubt conspiracy theories are already circulating like mad, and we don't really know what caused this to occur.  Crooks was killed by security.

Trump was in the midst of a speech in which he had apparently been decrying the dangers of illegal immigration.  

Whatever the motivation for the assault may be, and we may never know them, the campaign language on the far right, and to a degree the far left, has been heated now for at least three election cycles, with this one taking the top.  Trump supporters have grown increasingly aggressive in their speech.  It is, therefore, not a really a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention that a violent action occurred.

Indeed, while I haven't posted anything on it here, I've been expecting something like this to occur, although I thought it most likely to occur if Trump was reelected.  Repeated resort to violent and extreme language, in and of itself, provokes violence, and the far right has not only used that language, but on January 6, they acted upon it.  Trump's citation to authoritarianism, which is extreme, nearly made such an action inevitable.

The fact that this occurred will make Trump sort of a hero martyr and carry him back into the Oval Office.   A certain section of Trump's supporters from the Evangelical right will see this as proof that his mission is ordained and protected by God.  The dramatic photograph of Trump rising his fist in defiance will now be seen on campaign posters from here on out.  Like so many violent actions, whatever Crooks was attempting to achieve, it likely achieved the opposite.

One thing that will be interesting to see is how the Republicans now treat the topic of gun control.  Numerous mass shootings have done nothing to cause them to move, but the party now so slavishly follows Trump, and Trump is now a shooting victim, that I expect the hardline position that has been taken by the GOP to be abandoned, much like their long standing positions on abortion have seemed to, and their position on national defense did before that.

July 15, 2024

President Biden addressed the nation last night.

THE PRESIDENT:   Good afternoon.  Last night, I spoke with Donald Trump.  I’m sincerely grateful that he’s doing well and recovering.  And we had a short but good conversation.

Jill and I are keeping him and his family in our prayers. 

We also extend our deepest condolences to the family of the victim who was killed.  He was a father.  He was protecting his family from the bullets that were being fired, and he lost his life.  God love him. 

We’re also praying for the full recovery of those who were injured.  And we’re grateful to the Secret Service agents and other law enforcement agencies who — and individuals who risked their lives, literally, for our nation.

As I said last night, there is no place in America for this kind of violence or for any violence for that matter.

An assassination attempt is contrary to everything we stand for as a na- — as a nation.  Everything.  It’s not who we are as a nation.  It’s not America, and we cannot allow this to happen.

Unity is the most elusive goal of all, but nothing is important than that right now — unity.

We’ll debate, and we’ll disagree.  That’s not — that’s not going to change.  But it’s going to — we’re going to not lose sight of the fact of who we are as Americans.

Look, Vice President Harris and I were just briefed in the Situation Room by my homeland security team, including the director of the FBI, the secretary of Homeland Security, the attorney general, the director of the Secret Service, my homeland security advisor, the national security advisor.  And we’re going to continue to be briefed.

The FBI is leading this investigation, which is still in its early stages.  We don’t yet have any information about the motive of the shooter.  We know who he is.  I urge everyone — everyone, please, don’t make assumptions about his motives or his affiliations.

Let the FBI do their job, and their partner agencies do their job.  I’ve instructed that this investigation be thorough and swift.  And the investigators will have every resource they need to get this done.

Look, as this investigation continues, here’s what we’re going to do.

First, Mr. Trump, as a former president and nominee of the Republican Party already receives a heightened level of security, and I have been consistent in my direction to the Secret Service to provide him with every resource, capability, and protective measure necessary to ensure his continued safety.

Second, I’ve directed the head of the Secret Service to review all security measures for the — all security measures for the Republican National Convention, which is scheduled to start tomorrow.

And third, I’ve directed an independent review of the national security at yesterday’s rally to assess exactly what happened.  And we’ll share the results of that independent review with the American people as well.

And, finally, I’ll be speaking more about this tonight at greater length from the Oval Office: We must unite as one nation.  We must unite as one nation to demonstrate who we are. 

And so, may God bless you all.  And may God protect our troops.

Thank you very much.

cont:

Trump has chosen J. D. Vance to be his running mate.  Since switching his earlier views and deciding to favor Trump, Vance has been nothing if not fanatically pro Trump.

Last edition:

The 2024 Election, Part XX. The Debate Edition

Labels: 2020s, 2024, 2024 Election, Commentary, Donald Trump, Joseph Biden, Politics, Predictions, Query, Question for the readers

Blog Mirror: Who’s the real elite in America?

 

Who’s the real elite in America?

Blog Mirror: What to say to a Republican who complains about the federal debt.

 

What to say to a Republican who complains about the federal debt.

Blog mirror: The Party’s Over

 

The Party’s Over

Blog Mirror: The end of the necktie?

 

The end of the necktie?

Blog Mirror: Less than 60 percent of the vote in South Carolina? Sheesh. Trump continues to do poorly in Republican caucuses and primaries Why is the mainstream media referring to them as “big victories” for Trump?

 

Less than 60 percent of the vote in South Carolina? Sheesh. Trump continues to do poorly in Republican caucuses and primaries

Why is the mainstream media referring to them as “big victories” for Trump?

Blog Mirror: Wanna know Trump’s running mate?

 My guess as well:

Wanna know Trump’s running mate?

What's the matter with Wyoming (and Iowa)?

The other day Robert Reich, whose writing I have a love/hate relationship with, wrote this article:

What’s the matter with Iowa?

I'll admit that I was prepared to dismiss it when I started reading it, but I can't. It's a well reasoned article.

I don't think it sums up everything that's "wrong" with Iowa, but it gets some things right.  This could just as easily be said, about Wyoming, however:

I saw it happen. When I was helping Fritz Mondale in 1984, I noticed Iowa beginning to shift from family farms to corporate agriculture, and from industrialized manufacturing to knowledge-intensive jobs.

The challenge was to create a new economy for Iowa and for much of the Midwest.

I didn’t have any good ideas for creating that new economy, though — and neither did Mondale, who won Iowa’s Democratic caucuses that year but lost the general election to Ronald Reagan in Iowa and every other state, except his own Minnesota.

Yet not until George W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004 did a Republican presidential candidate win Iowa again.

When Tom Vilsack was governor of Iowa in the early 2000s and flirting with the idea of a presidential run, he told me he worried that Iowa’s high school valedictorians used to want to attend the University of Iowa or Iowa State, but now wanted the Ivy League or Stanford or NYU. Even Iowa’s own college graduates were leaving for Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and New York.

Vilsack wanted to know how to keep Iowa’s talent in Iowa — a variant of the question I couldn’t answer for Mondale. By this time I had a few ideas — setting up high-tech hubs around major universities, blanketing parts of the state with free wi-fi, having community colleges supply the talent local industries needed — but they all cost money that Iowa didn’t have.

As The New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman noted recently, Iowa continues to lose more than 34 percent of its college graduates each year. Illinois, by contrast, gains 20 percent more college graduates than it produces. Minnesota has about 8 percent more college grads than it produces.

This talent migration has hastened America’s split into two cultures, not just in Iowa and the Midwest but across the nation.

But not entirely.

The thing people like Reich don't get is that much of the country doesn't want to become an upper middle class urban cesspool.  Places that people like Reich worship are largely abhorrent in living terms.  There's a reason that people look to rural areas and an idealized past.

But people also lash themselves to a dead economy as if it'll come back, even if it means losing track of reality at some point, or even if it means becoming something they claim to detest, welfare recipients. This has happened all over the US.

Something needs to be done to revitalize the main street economy, and people like Reich don't have the answers because at the end of the day, all American economists see things the same way.  Everything is corporate, the only question is how much, if any, restraint you put on corporations.

Distributism would cure a lot of this.

If we had a more Distributist economy, we'd have a more local one.  For rural areas, that'd mean much more local processing of locally produced goods.  There's no reason for the concentration of the meat packing industry, for example. Beef could be packed locally.  At one time, my family did just that. And that's only one example.

If the economy was reoriented in that fashion, local industry would expand a great deal.  The thing is, of course, not all of those jobs would be the glass and steel mind-numbing cubicle jobs that all economists love.

But here's the other thing.  As long as the economy is oriented the way it is, rural states are going to be colonies of urban areas, just as much as, let's say, French Indochina was a colony of France, or Kenya a colony of the United Kingdom.  Exploitative, in another word.  It's not intentionally so, it is an economic reality.

The problem there is that in those sorts of economies everything is produced for export alone, and everything is precarious.  That gets back to my Distributist argument above.

But it also gets to a certain cultural thing in which those deeply aligned with the economy, which includes most people, can't see anything thing else. As long as the economy keeps working, that's okay. But when changes come, that can be a disaster.

Wyoming's very first economy was the fur trade, if we discount the native economy (which is a real economy, and accordingly should not be discounted).  Contrary to the popular belief, the fur trade was not displaced, it just was never really very large, and therefore it diminished in importance when other things came in.

The other things were 1) agriculture, which came first, followed by the 2) extractive industries.  Both are still with us.  Agriculture has suffered to a degree as the naturally distributist industries that support it have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate economics and consolidation.  The state, for its part, did nothing to arrest that trend and simply let it happen.  In part, that's because the state has always deeply worshiped the thought that the extractive industries will make us all rich and nothing is to be interfered with, including losing local production of the raw resources that are first produced here.  I.e., we don't refine the oil as much as we used to, we don't pack the meat, we don't process the wool. . . . 

And the extractive industries certainly have made a lot of people and entire communities rich, there's no question of it.

But the handwriting is on the wall.  Coal is declining and will continue to do so.  And a massive shift in petroleum use is occurring, which Wyoming cannot stop.  Petroleum will still be produced far into the future, but its use as a fuel is disappearing.  Petrochemicals, on the other hand, are not.

We seemingly like to think we can stop those things from changing in any form.  We've tried to through lawsuits and legislation.  And yet it turns out that people buying EV's don't listen to our litigation or legislation, any more than they do to Nebraska's Senator Deb Fischer's whining about recharging station funding.  Like some who can't face death due to illness, we'll grasp at what we can, rather than adjust.

Part of that is listening to people who tell us what we want to hear.  A lot of politicians have tried to gently tell us the truth of what we're facing.  Governor Gordon did just recently. When they do that, they're castigated for it.

In 1962's The Days of Wine and Roses the plot follows a man who is a social drinker and introduces alcohol to his girlfriend. They marry, and over time they become heavy drinkers.  He finally stops drinking, his wife having left him, and finds her in an apartment, where she is now a hardcore alcoholic.  He resumes drinking then and there, in order to be with her.

In the end, however, he reforms and quits. She doesn't. We know how that will end.

That's a lot like Wyomingites in general.  We've received the hard knocks and blows.  Some of us are going to put the bottle down and face the day, some are not going to under any circumstances.

For some, it's easier to believe that a "dictator for a day" can order the old economy restored and reverse fifty years of demographic change, while reversing supply, demand, and technology to sort of 1970s status.  In other words, go ahead and have another drink, it won't hurt you.

But in reality, it might, and probably will.

Blog Mirror: Robert Reich. Freedom and Power (Why American capitalism is so rotten, Part 4)

 

Freedom and Power (Why American capitalism is so rotten, Part 4)

The golden ticket.

America’s prestigious universities play a big role in determining who gets into America’s wealthy elite.

A degree from Harvard, Penn, or M.I.T., to take three examples, is a meal ticket to a lucrative job on Wall Street or a corporate law firm and to the richest and most influential people in the land.

Robert Reich.

Which is exactly what's wrong with the Ivy League system (I'll omit MIT from that).

Which is also why, quite frankly, government, particularly the Court's, ought to go on a 30 year moratorium on hiring Ivy League grads. 

Blog Mirror: Have they no sense of decency?

A Robert Reich item about Elise Stefanik:

Have they no sense of decency?

The descent of Stefanik has been epic.  It hardly makes sense, at least in the case of a person who has any integrity at all. Starting off as a centrist, she's turned into a Trump hack.

This effort to sanction the court and the court's clerk is shocking.

Stefanik is really playing with fire here. There's at least a halfway decent chance she'll be sanctioned for filing such a bogus challenge. And if the country survives the next election, long term she's going to have the same sort of reputation that Joe McCarthy now has, save for the fact that she'll fully deserve it and McCarthy only partially did.

Unlike McCarthy, Stefanik is a mother. What a legacy for that child will be left.

Blog Mirror: Whose life expectancy is dropping — and what this has to do with the rise of Trumpism The Roots of Trumpism (Part 9)

 

Whose life expectancy is dropping — and what this has to do with the rise of Trumpism

The Roots of Trumpism (Part 9)

What's wrong with this analogy?

Look, I largely agree with the assertion that American laborers are getting paid to little.

But this is historically wackadoodle.

Robert Reich

@RBReich

·

34m

90% of Americans born in the early 1940s were making more than their parents by the time they reached their prime earning years. Today, only half of adults born in the mid-1980s are now earning more than their parents. Workers are fed up for good reason.

Americans born in the early 1940s were born in an era in which German, Italian, French, British, and Japanese industry had been bombed into oblivion.

Of course, American industry did well.  It was the only thing left.

For some weird reason, Americans just can't grasp that the super North American economy of the 50s and 60s was due to World War Two.

Blog Mirror: Resurrecting the Common Good: Honor and Shame

Interesting article by Robert Reich:

Resurrecting the Common Good: Honor and Shame

Note without, however, more than a little irony associated with it.

Reich's points are correct. At the same time, however, he's in the category of "no shame" progressives that have sought to remove any remaining social behavior standards whatsoever.

They all go together, as they all have, in the end, the same source.

Blog Mirror: How old is too old?

An intersting entry from Robert Reich, with many interesting replies, some of which are my own.

How old is too old?

At one time grocers were local.

 Robert Reich

@RBReich

·

2h

Why are grocery prices so high? Monopoly power. If Kroger succeeds in merging with Albertsons, it will control: Safeway Ralphs Smith’s Harris Teeter Dillons Fred Meyer Vons Jewel-Osco Shaw’s

Why, oh why, must we have this absurd consolidation?