“President Barack Obama didn’t quite blame his ally Hillary Clinton for causing her stunning loss to Donald Trump last week — but he chided her for not focusing on reaching out to white, non-urban voters like he did in 2008 and 2012,” reads Politico.
“Obama — about to hand off the presidency to a man whom he declared temperamentally unfit to serve — pointedly declined to endorse Clinton’s own explanation for her defeat …”
Phoning it in, the first two paragraphs of Stronger Together:
IT HAS BEEN SAID that America is great because America is good.
Homeland Security employs a quarter of a million people, the majority of which are not involved in physical strong-arming, not a secret police.
ICE –Immigration and Customs Enforcement employs 20,000. DEA employs 11,000.
Trump spouts nonsense when he says he can deport 2-3 million. Simple brainpower and arithmetic show it’s not a trivial thing. Ya can’t just tell border patrol to get rid of them.
How many people do you need to process and forcibly deport one person, completely disregarding the need for housing, transportation and facilities? Two, three, more?
The domestic national security regime wold immediately have to be expanded by a few million, at least. And, it has to be said, transfer camps would need to be built. Remember, Donald J. Trump doesn’t do back of the envelope calculations; he doesn’t do any serious detail thinking.
Do you think the US will embark on building an infrastructure and security force similar to what — well, what other country? The answer’s on the tip of your tongue. But do you really think that?
This is not to say you shouldn’t be concerned by his nincompoop blather on “60 Minutes.” It is to say what will have to be done if it’s not total rubbish? Who’s going to sign up to join the secret police, to be the force for the loading areas?
Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential elections helped shares of Corrections Corp. rise as much as 60 percent before paring their surge to 34 percent by 10:14 a.m. in New York, while GEO Group Inc. was trading 18 percent higher by the same time.
Those moves mean the stocks have recouped some of the losses they’ve registered since August, when the Department of Justice said it would start phasing out privately run jails. Analysts say President Trump would be likely to reverse that policy …
This could cynically be described as part of Trump’s jobs program.
However, private prisons are already filled.
Since mass deportation would be a federal project and DoJ was ordered to divest from private prisons that would, as the Bloomberg piece states, need to reverse.
Federal prisons holds 220,000, of which only 30,000 were held by private sector business. Again, the expansion would have to be radical and impossible to ignore.
From the Dept. of Grim Jokes:
Digital copies of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Hitler: Ascent — 1889 – 1939 surge out of Amazon a week after the election of Donald Trump. Two weeks later American readers ask for refunds upon finding both books are over 1000 pages; wish to buy safety pins to assuage guilt over epic fuck-up, instead.
Your song for the day. Fighting involves willingness to take a punch, not posting crap dumpling pic memes on social media.
Before posting the contemptuous crap-dumpling picture meme of white trash who voted Trump on Twitter or Facebook, always remember to type “love trumps hate.”
Heard today on Fox radio news after listening to the Penn State game: A march on Trump Tower in NYC by Michael Moore and “a cast of thousands.” Moore promised the people would not allow Trump, who was “illegitimate,” to take office.
No takebacks. No reversals. HRC lost her alleged “firewall states.” Unless you actually want a constitutional crisis, the US government to fall and for you to be regarded as indistinguishable from those who threatened Barack Obama with the same thing over the last eight years.
No #calexit. And beating people over the head with the Brexit borrowed symbolism of safety pins won’t win a revolution. If you use your head, hard at this point, it’s like asking everyone, every one of the good people, that is, to wear an arm band, so they can know who to cluster with in public against the bad people. Quite the ideal. And when you’re finished with that you’ve found you’ve lost your moorings.
The culture of lickspittle is not fertile ground for cultivation of a revolutionary army.
Eat your plate of bugs and worms. And if you think the song is about you, it’s not.
The heavy metal dates from 1987, Allentown/Bethlehem, smack in the middle of the time of the collapse of “the steel.” The guitar solo was composed as an extended scream.
Metaphorically, a scream of rage, echoing down the years, always gaining strength, howled into the heart of the establishment and blew it to perdition yesterday.
From the album “Brutality,” when I’d given up on science. I couldn’t do 12 years of postdoc for virtually nothing and an only theoretical opportunity at the end of the tunnel. The game was being rigged for everyone.
“So sing happy songs on the radio and watch as the world crumbles down…”
From the Out & About in the Pasadena Neighborhood desk: An old pick-up truck driven by an old man, older than me, with a “Make America Great Again” bumper sticker. The truck, which sags a little in the mid-joint, is kept spotlessly clean. Someone appears to live out of it much of the time. I see it almost everyday. It has a little American flag hanging from the back.
The Trump voter is definitely not just in the heartland or the deep South, or rural, as broadstrokes from the media have it. They’re not hard to find. And they’re not only the uneducated but still well off. Believe the line the well-educated are only a little bit of it? And misguided, too? Surely there can be no one with advanced degrees who can’t see how deadly Trump would be to the world!
But from Thomas Edsall at the NY Times a week or so ago:
“Trade comes with no assurances that the spoils will be shared equitably. Across much of the industrialized world, an outsize share of the winnings has been harvested by people with advanced degrees, stock options and the need for accountants. Ordinary laborers have borne the costs and suffered from joblessness and deepening economic anxiety … failed to plan for the trauma that has accompanied the benefits of trade. When millions of workers lost paychecks to foreign competition, they lacked government supports to cushion the blow. As a result, seething anger is upending politics in Europe and North America.”
Globalization has not just damaged making things. It’s converted survival into a winner-take-all, make artisanal goods or crawl grub street economy. Make high-end trivialities and conveniences for the upper classes, do an endless succession of no-win freelance gigs for about nothing, or liquidate what you have left in an internet buyer’s market. It’s had a widespread effect, the cost of which to the non-select — diminished lifespans, widespread narcotics addiction, suicide, to name a few things in the news — is finally being measured.
You want to write off tens of millions of people who you don’t agree with on much of anything because we believe them to have made poor choices, not be educated the right way, or because they are bigots?
I can’t do it and believe me, I’m acutely aware I did more than my share For Escape from WhiteManistan. No one deserved what bad national leadership and economic policies favoring the elites did to them or people they knew or more distant family members over the past few decades.
I recently saw Michael Moore’s Trumpland. It’s a hurried-up release of his live show put on in Wilmington, Ohio, in Trump territory although I’m not sure there were many Trump voters in the theatre crowd. Part of his monologue, the backdrop of which is large hanging photos of Hillary Clinton from various stages in her life, centers on that Moore doesn’t believe Trump voters are all racists. In Michigan he’s talked to Trump supporters and tells the audience they they know the guy’s odious.
Reading from a notebook, Moore recognizes this is a revenge vote. He gets it, he says. His first and best doc, Roger & Me, went deep into the why that’s only become worse.
Moore goes onto say this is the dying white middle class’s (the 2nd America as the LATimes patronizingly put it last week) chance to throw a bomb into the “establishment.” Trump is “your Molotov cocktail,” and they can deliver the “biggest F— you ever recorded in human history” to those who’ve been running the country.
“[He’s] the human hand grenade they can legally throw into the system that’s stolen their lives from them,” Moore continues.
Moore thinks the anger justified. So do I. I want to throw the bomb.
But in the end he implies Trumpland ought not to do it because it will only feel good for “a day, a week,” “possibly a month.” And they would regret it, at which point the movie goes back to some comedy, spoofing a Trump inauguration.
And this is something our six figure explainers haven’t been able to do. HRC hasn’t done it. She won’t even go near the territory unless you count a paragraph or two from a speech to bankers she tried to keep secret.
Moore riffs on a Trump rally where the candidate tells his audience and Ford Motor Company directly that if the manufacturer moves production to Mexico, he’s imposing a 37 percent tariff on their cars. With Trump it’s balderdash. But it’s something Moore points out you’d never hear from any other politician.
There’s been nothing for the Trump voter or anyone who believes Hillary Clinton’s blandishments and “Stronger Together” motto are empty pandering. And in the context of the election’s daily spew such things have become progressively more intelligence insulting. What together, precisely? Define your terms.
There’s only been a slow grudging admission that globalism has largely screwed Americans, except for the top and their educated shoeshiners, the alleged meritocracy, now frantic to suppress the revolt. They brought fossilization to the economy, a condition in which wealth and corporate power chisels whatever it can from everyone else stuck in it. And that they might have to pay for it in a way they hadn’t planned on has them all at the barricades.
You see, they say in opinion after opinion, you just don’t see that globalism is always good, perhaps it needs only some tinkering, and there’s nothing to be done, anyway, wouldn’t be pragmatic, not prudent. But, jeezus, everyone has to keep that guy out of office because he’s not who we are.
Few of our influencers, certainly Hillary Clinton, will never come right out and admit there’s a rightness to “they’ve had it coming,” to a satisfaction in the chance she would be denied what she believes to be destiny. Clinton hasn’t had to answer to it (only in polls which her show virtually as disliked as Trump) because she’s running against Trumpwhere a strategy of phoning it in worked. (I’ve read her promises and policies book. There’s no need to go into the details of how empty it is once you get past the language of uplift.)
For her entire career she’s been at or near the epicenter of grasping American wealth, rule by the boilerplate from elites, and war without consequences for those who’ve made all the mistakes.
There’s been no discussion of issues this cycle. Zero on global warming. And Clinton has fobbed off any anger at her and government by blithely saying that such an emotion doesn’t solve anything. Neither has she. It’s all been verbal kung fu to the miscues and unfolding sordid biography of Trump: theatrical eye-rolling, jeering laughter, blaming the Russians, Julian Assange, now the FBI, always someone else in league with the enemy, and a “I’m the only one standing between you and the apocalypse” joke.
Hillary Clinton has more than done her part to earn the biggest election F— you! in history. The dilemma is in resolving the delivery of a share of it, of belief in the legitimacy of revenge, and conscience.
The emails never bothered me much, but Hillary’s statement urging all the parties involved at Standing Rock — protesters and pipeline company — ” to find a path forward that serves the broadest public interest” fills me with revulsion. This as the soldiers and cops closed in on on the tribespeople. — Barbara Ehrenreich, Facebook, 10/30
The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.
Here Baker spends time discussing trade-agreement (or government granted) patent monopolies, one direct result of is which Americans pay usurious/ridiculous prices for life-saving drugs. Over the past year, it’s a topic he’s addressed again and again, and what to do about it.
I’ve cited him here — frequently. And I’ll be reading the book.
Economists have long struggled to explain why a growing proportion of men in the prime of their lives are not employed or looking for work. A new study has found that nearly half of these men are on painkillers and many are disabled …
Surveys taken between 2010 and this year show that 40 percent of prime working-age men who are not in the labor force report having pain that prevents them from taking jobs for which they are qualified. More than a third of the men not in the labor force said they had difficulty walking or climbing stairs or had another disability. Forty-four percent said they took painkillers daily and two-thirds of that subset were on prescription medicines …
The connection between chronic joblessness and painkiller dependency is hard to quantify. Mr. Krueger and other experts cannot say which came first: the men’s health problems or their absence from the labor force. Some experts suspect that frequent use of painkillers is a result of being out of work, because people who have no job prospects are more likely to be depressed, become addicted to drugs and alcohol and have other mental health problems.
I can assert I’ve never had a vicodin, an oxycontin or a hypo of heroin. And I am not on disability. I have not been diagnosed with depression. As to “other mental health problems,” who can say?
More research is needed, admits the newspaper. In the meantime, maybe “some things could be done to help workers who’ve given up.”
“While [the Times piece references] interesting work, implying that the problem of people dropping out of the labor force is a story about men is seriously misleading,” writes Baker today.” Both prime-age men and women have been increasingly dropping out of the labor force in the last 15 years.”
“The more obvious source of the problem lies with the people (disproportionately men) designing economic policy.”
Ouch. Could our great leaders be secretly nursing opioid addictions?
From the Guardian today, two of the six-figure swells go full Hitler: “Accusations of betrayal. Demagoguery and hatred. The bunker in Berlin. Comparisons with Adolf Hitler have been tempting throughout Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign for the presidency – never more so than at its mad, destructive climax.
“The Republican’s presidential bid appears to have become the campaign equivalent of the last days of the reich, when Germany’s leadership raged at bearers of bad news from the battlefield, ordered non-existent divisions to launch counteroffensives, and embraced a nihilistic plan to burn it all down and take everyone along.”
Real close to our predicament, huh?
Berlin was in ruins, encircled by three or four tank armies, not Americans, but the Red Army which had been left to take down the Fuhrer for obvious reasons. It had born the vast weight of casualties inflicted by the Fuhrer’s armies in the war.
And Germany’s leadership, plural, was not involved. It was the Fuhrer and only the Fuhrer who moved “non-existent” units, OKW — the supreme command of the Wehrmacht, and OKH, the general staff of the German army, had given up. There’s was to stand idly by and send out the Fuhrer’s senseless commands.
In the US, the capital is not rubble. And young school boys are not everywhere, manning 88’s at street corners and jumping out of hiding places to fire Panzerfaust’s (rocket propelled grenades) at the Red Army. The GOP higher ups are not going to be captured and tried as war criminals. And the entire country is not in ruins.
There are no real similarities between the last days of the Third Reich and election 2016. C’mon. Tthe digital flights of fancy are just a matter of the pampered taking the time to make themselves the center of attention, in comparing the catastrophe of the election to what was the climax of the inferno of World War II.
No, collectively, we’re just not that important.
This is going to pass and after November and when Barack Obama finally leaves the scene, the United States will still have no effective government. And there will be no fighting of global warming because the global chemistry is in, we’re way too late. Wall Street will go on as usual because the new President appreciates that they live successful, sophisticated and complicated lives there.
But our lives will continue to be boiled down by tech in synergy with corporate America. The police will continue to kill African Americans at will and acquire armored fighting vehicles.
Eighty percent of evangelicals will have voted for the man, in spite of everything. The majority of the US military will have voted for him, in spite of everything. Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Arizona, Indiana and quite a few more states will have voted for him, in spite of everything. The six figure swells will be stunned, just stunned by the number of people who, even in losing, voted for Trump. And there will be no more mood to join together and accept things, even if only for a little while, than there is now. There will be less, much less.
The most expensive global military in history will keep behaving as if nothing is going on at home and continue to bomb the poorest places. That is, until maybe we stumble into a war with Russia, that country that took down the Fuhrer. And then we’ll have a great new series of events to write stupid similes and metaphors about, up until rubble-ization comes home.
They’re never going to get it until things begin to get torn down right around them.
Trump’s shocking rise and spectacular fall have been a singular disaster for U.S. politics. Built up in the press as the American Hitler, he was unmasked in the end as a pathetic little prankster who ruined himself, his family and half of America’s two-party political system …
That such a small man would have such an awesome impact on our nation’s history is terrible, but it makes sense if you believe in the essential ridiculousness of the human experience. Trump picked exactly the wrong time to launch his mirror-gazing rampage to nowhere. He ran at a time when Americans on both sides of the aisle were experiencing a deep sense of betrayal by the political class, anger that was finally ready to express itself at the ballot box.
The only thing that could get in the way of real change – if not now, then surely very soon – was a rebellion so maladroit, ill-conceived and irresponsible that even the severest critics of the system would become zealots for the status quo.
In the absolute best-case scenario, the one in which he loses, this is what Trump’s run accomplished. He ran as an outsider antidote to a corrupt two-party system, and instead will leave that system more entrenched than ever.
