American politics 2016: Lawyers, Guns, and D-Money

alt-left

maybe not dumb, just someone you disagree with?

An interesting moment when I realized watching two billionaires by both of them needs it its a crime its happening while americans strave

I've seen people call it the 'harassment left'.

Have you never seen a socially-liberal racist before?

Plenty, of the upscale "I didn't send my child to that public school because, um, TEST SCORES" variety, but this seems novel to me. Like I didn't know there were a lot of Bernie Sanders voters who think "black privilege" is a thing. Maybe I am naive.

maybe not dumb, just someone you disagree with?

― Van Horn Street, Thursday, October 6, 2016 11:16 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

feel like this needs to be a pop-up post that flashes every time someone decides somebody else is dumb bc they have a different viewpoint

strave it off 1-2-3 and now you can count to 3.

yessssss

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/10/our-future-paul-ryans-hands

Seems a bit too kind to Ryan, despite his protests...Plus he phrases things as an either/or-- when Ryan likes to muddy things and have it both ways(ie., He wants to address poverty and suggests earned income tax credit be increased, BUT paid for by cutting other aid for poor)

Meanwhile a brief filed before Kansas Supreme Court approvingly cites Dred Scott: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/10/19/kansas_cites_dred_scott_to_explain_why_it_can_ban_abortion.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_top

Ouch

odd that they'd cite it, but the part they quote is still the standard legal interpretation.

Dred Scott has been a rightwing/pro-life totem for at least 12 years. Dubya mentioned it in one of the 04 debates.

Dred Scott has been a rightwing/pro-life totem for at least 12 140 years. Dubya mentioned it in one of the 04 debates.

Is Dicks Out for Bad Hombre a meme/tshirt yet?

idk where else to put this:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-philippines-idUSKCN12K0AS

The guy is crazy

they don't call him the trump of the philippines for nothing

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710/

Long but interesting article that argues that young post-watergate Dems were socially liberal but abandoned economic populism and anti-monopoly, anti-trust views and policies, and that such ideas are only coming back now via Elizabeth Warren...

the Watergate Babies were weaned on campus politics, television, and affluence.

What’s more, the new members were antiwar, not necessarily anti-bank. “Our generation did not know the Depression,” then-Representative Paul Tsongas said. “The populism of the 1930s doesn’t really apply to the 1970s,” argued Pete Stark, a new California member who launched his political career by affixing a giant peace sign onto the roof of the bank he owned...Over the next 40 years, this Democratic generation fundamentally altered American politics. They restructured “campaign finance, party nominations, government transparency, and congressional organization.” They took on domestic violence, homophobia, discrimination against the disabled, and sexual harassment. They jettisoned many racially and culturally authoritarian traditions. They produced Bill Clinton’s presidency directly, and in many ways, they shaped President Barack Obama’s.

The result today is a paradox. At the same time that the nation has achieved perhaps the most tolerant culture in U.S. history, the destruction of the anti-monopoly and anti-bank tradition in the Democratic Party has also cleared the way for the greatest concentration of economic power in a century. This is not what the Watergate Babies intended when they dethroned Patman as chairman of the Banking Committee. But it helped lead them down that path. ...Democrats and Republicans still fought. Neoliberals, while agreeing with Reagan Republicans on a basic view that the structure of corporate America should be as depoliticized and as shielded from voters as possible, still vehemently opposed Ronald Reagan on environmental policy, foreign policy, and taxes. But the very idea of competition policy, of inserting democracy into the economy, made no sense to them. Previously, voters had expected politicians to do something about everything from the price of milk to mortgage rates. Now, neoliberals expressed public power through financial markets. As libertarian and future Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan had written a decade before, “The ultimate regulator of competition in a free economy is the capital market.”

I think it goes too easy on Reagan and Bork and Bush, but it's still an interesting read

I think it's a top-down vs bottom-up approach to progressive economic reform. What used to be led by unions now has to be led by federal regulators driven by elected officials and their appointees. The goals haven't changed and the goalposts haven't really moved much - where they have moved, it's because of what the federal executive and judicial branches are capable of, versus what could be done state by state or county by county. There's still a shitload of progressive economic changes that are happening at the local level, in places where that's achievable, but the focus of the Caucus is on national level, federal rules that help us get to egalitarian, gender parity wages and such. When local efforts succeed, they become case studies for "Why not everywhere?" nationwide initiatives.

It's a good article, though I'd say it doesn't just 'go easy' on the right, it almost seems to think they've had no influence at all. The entire political story of the US is told as internal discussions among democrats, that Bill Clinton might have triangulated due to the public or his GOP congress doesn't really factor into it. But it was well researched, fair and interesting.

It gets the New Deal very wrong though. That's why I can't take it seriously.

Plus, the Dems aren't where they were in 1988 or 1978.

Re the New Deal: the South was not a bastion of economic liberals, despite congressional support for the Tennessee Valley Authority. We had something called Jim Crow.

I think he briefly acknowledged the situation in the South but then glossed over it. I think his hero Patman went along with Jim Crow in Texas order to provide economic populism for his white constituents. As Patman's Wikileaks bio and the article noted: [he] was a U.S. Congressman from Texas in Texas's 1st congressional district and chair of the United States House Committee on Banking and Currency (1965–75). A self-styled "populist" he energetically attacked the banks, the banking system, and the Federal Reserve system. He sponsored the Robinson-Patman Act of 1935. It was designed to protect small retail shops against competition from chain stores by fixing a minimum price for retail products

His simplistic take here ignores the Republican Goldwater Southern strategy to get the votes of those white Southern Dems who were leaving the Democratic party because of civil rights. It also omits the role of Republicans and big business in lessening the strength of unions:

When RFK died, Democrats nominated New Deal populist and Vietnam War supporter Humphrey, which split the party between the new-left youth activists and the labor-influenced party regulars—leading to the turbulent 1968 national convention. After Humphrey’s loss to Nixon, Democrats formed the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, also known as the McGovern-Fraser Commission, which sought to heal and restructure the party. With the help of strategist Fred Dutton, Democrats forged a new coalition. By quietly cutting back the influence of unions, Dutton sought to eject the white working class from the Democratic Party, which he saw as “a major redoubt of traditional Americanism and of the antinegro, antiyouth vote.” The future, he argued, lay in a coalition of African Americans, feminists, and affluent, young, college-educated whites. In 1972, George McGovern would win the Democratic nomination with this very coalition, and many of the Watergate Babies entering office just three years later gleaned their first experiences in politics on his campaign.

Here's where I recommend Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself, a history of Southern support for the New Deal and how the poorest region in the country accepted the ND's more redistributive programs while denying those services to blacks.

On Tuesday night I happened to read the part in Joseph Lelyveld's His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roosevelt were 'assistant president' Jimmy Byrnes, future segregationalist governor of South Carolina, bases his case on joining the ticket as FDR's running mate on the argument that only a Southerner could fight the poll tax.

*sigh*

http://cookpolitical.com/house/charts/race-ratings

i'm reading Fear Itself right now (well i put it down for a bit cos it's a slog), i'd say his point about the southern political class was that they *were* very left economically! but they were at the same time passionately anticommunist, generally anti-union and of course totally committed to white supremacy. a weird blend but yes there were very anti-bank, pro-redistribution

the crazy opening detail about the italian fascist air force pilot leading a squadron across the atlantic to rapturous applause everywhere was fucking mindbending btw. amazing book.

Saw this take by a Ohio State prof Kevin Boyle in his NY Times review of Fear Itself

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/books/review/fear-itself-by-ira-katznelson.html?_r=0

It’s a powerful argument, swept along by Katznelson’s robust prose and the imposing scholarship that lies behind it. Only at the very end of the book, though, does he acknowledge another side of the story. For all its compromises, the New Deal gave millions of Americans a sense of belonging — a sense of rights — they’d never had before. That sense swept through the industrial working class, where union buttons suddenly became badges of honor. It swept through all those ethnic communities that until the 1930s had been treated as not quite American. And despite the racial dynamics Katznelson so ably describes, it swept through African-­American communities too.

No doubt that’s why Bubbeh Frima saw Roosevelt as such a towering figure, because where she lived up in Washington Heights, America seemed a better place than it had been before he took office. That’s also why, just a few years after Roosevelt’s death, Jim Crow began to come tumbling down, shattered by a social movement that had been invigorated by the promise, if not necessarily the practice, of the New Deal era. Roosevelt can’t be given credit for that extraordinary triumph, of course; that belongs to the men, women and children who risked their lives on the streets of the South. But he played a role, however indirect. And any assessment of his legacy has to set that fact alongside the concessions that marred his administration and blighted our less than perfect union.

i'm reading Fear Itself right now (well i put it down for a bit cos it's a slog),

aw man I raced through it – it would have taken a Theodore Bilbo for me to put it down

holy shit @ kirk/duckworth debate. wtf is wrong with him

Is she looking at a layout of the Senate offices this morning?

gotta say, viewing american electoral shifts as primarily driven by race makes a hell of a lot more sense than the crappy old clintonian view of seeing them as driven by economics.

once you recognize something's happening, you can see how long it's been happening for. now that people are finally openly asking "what the hell is wrong with white people?", the political shift of whites without college educations from democrats to republicans makes more sense.

they've embraced an ideology that has systematically destroyed working-class economic opportunity because the republicans made them white. italians and polish and slavs didn't used to be white people; their political shift reflects their racial shift.

Roanoke (Virginia) Times endorses McCrory for NC governor; thanks him and HB2 for sending so many jobs to Virginia

Close race in NC for governor. Roanoke paper may not get its wish

Is there any actual chance California seceedes? Seems... possible.

That didn't go well the last time it was tried.

That didn't go well the last time it was tried.

― marzipandemonium (Ye Mad Puffin)

pretty sure questions of historical precedent are off the table at this point

great swatches, to use the parlance of the time, of Northern California are as far right as much of the more isolated parts of the west so idk how that'd work out

just means it's finally time for jefferson to achieve statehood!

god no. they'd just give us two more reactionary senators.

"us"

oh my god what the fuck was this guy smoking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmDhFCTAaPM

lol started giggling uncontrollably at :35

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trumps-infrastructure-plan-comes-important-catch

There are some real drawbacks to an infrastructure plan like this one.

The first is that’s probably a more expensive route, because it costs more for private businesses, which pay higher interest rates and need to make a profit, to borrow than for governments to do the same. As a Washington Post report added last week, the plan “would likely impose substantial costs in the form of tolls and fees on the people using the new infrastructure.”

Which leads us to the second and related problem: “new construction would only occur in communities where it is urgently needed if private investors were convinced users could afford to pay,” the Post explained.

In other words, areas with lower-income residents would be the least likely to see the benefits, because private investors would seek bigger returns elsewhere.