Cory Booker Condemned Trump’s Policies in Longest Senate Speech on Record. He enumerated negative effects Trump’s actions are having on science education.
Did he just call dead babies human capital… or live humans, for that matter?
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The video is >11 hours long so I am not sure what your referring to. But human capital refers to the knowledge, skills, abilities, and experience that individuals possess, which are considered valuable economically. It’s the collective human potential that drives productivity and economic growth. Why that repulses you is unclear. Adam Smith included in his definition of economic “the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society”.Dead babies as human capital makes no sense. Time stamp where you think you heard that and I’ll check it out.
I went to the Capitol at 2am yesterday, about 5 hours after he started. Had to pester the Capitol Police to let me in, they weren’t expecting it (neither were the pages and staffers). Super cool experience, and staying up a few hours late to watch left me completely in awe that he lasted 25 hours – and stayed on topic the whole time at that.
He was so complimentary of his colleagues, talking to and about his friends in both parties, their shared values and the things that they’ve cooperated on that are being destroyed. And about how this is really, truly a crisis moment for the institutions of our democracy.
I’m hopeful that this kind of thing can break through. I have family who aren’t very politically engaged and they noticed this and they’re talking about it.
And I loved seeing this followed up by an anti-Elon backlash in Wisconsin. Felt like a sea change. I feel anew a stir of hope – tempered by a well-justified suspicion of the feeling of hope.
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I would seriously challenge this. I see nothing explicitly or “almost explicitly” racist about any Republican platform position. Then again I am not a Republican and I do not vote, so maybe I missed something. Republicans tend to have a more small government, individualist approach compared to democrats. In the eyes of liberals this somehow translates into “racism”, which is not true. Racism is deliberately making policies and decisions in terms of race as a primary deciding factor, especially by favoring once race over another… you know, stuff like hiring and admission quotas and affirmative action. Things democrats love and republicans are often trying to get rid of.
I would say it is democrats who hate blacks more than republicans, based on what I have seen. Democrats who treat blacks as inferior, fundamentally incapable of self-responsibility, pushing abortion, drug culture, soft on crime and “fuck the police” mentalities on black communities as if any of that were healthy and good for them. Using black people as voter cattle ever 2-4 years whenever there’s an election. Whipping up racial hatred and division whenever they can point to a white person who harmed a black person, but downplaying or ignoring any time a black person harms a white person (or when a black person harms another black person).
You do realize cities with very large percentage of black residents, cities which are also areas of huge amounts of poverty, drugs and violent crime are all places run by democrats, right? Washington DC, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, NYC. How are the democrats running those cities doing when it comes to the lives of the black residents living there?
I spent 10 minutes trying to find it, but it was regarding research funding being canceled.
The term human capital should not exist. It should not be used of humans—living or dead.
How can people miss that irony? It’s like calling them tools to their faces. It’s like taking it as granted that you yourself are a tool and not realizing that’s what you’re doing.
I really don’t care who started it first (wasn’t that the manufacturing consent dude?). How does that legitimize it? Why would you try to legitimize that?
Note that the government was a large purchaser of dead babies and their organs for research. most of those dead babies, just like those triaged to death during the pandemic, were of minorities.
Inclusion is awesome as long as it also includes white people rather than excluding them. …but not when aborting babies for research, of course. Nobody should be included in that.
I get it. But, in the capitalist system if something cannot be monetized, it’s worthless.
I don’t know where Booker stands on that. There will probably be an edited transcript with an index. He may aspire to run for president in 2028.
This from my friend’s fb page:
On the floor of the Senate today:
“We are both deeply devoted Christians. You and I grapple with this faith of ours, which demands the most radical love. The most radical love. What does the Bible say about immigrants? What does the Bible say about the poor? I mean, come on! What does the Bible say about the hated, the prostitute, the leper, the people who are looked down upon, what does it say about the prodigal son?
What does Matthew 25 say about how we should live? ‘Even as to the least of these, you did to me.’ How many times does the Bible mention poverty? Two thousand times. And does it say we should scorn the poor, and ignore the poor? No. It calls us to love our neighbour, no exceptions to that."
Senator Cory Booker, holding the floor now for over 20 hours, without a bathroom break or being allowed to even sit down.
That resonated.
But. If it was meant to justify aborting babies for research… it’s just a polished turd.
That’s a big”if”. I’m not going to entertain it further here until It gets time stamped in the speech. Meanwhile, I referenced Booker’s filibuster for what it’s worth as an instance of resistance to Trump’s assault on democracy. I’m moving on. It’s definitely a topic that needs to be addressed going forward since it’s a wedge issue that the dominant political parties have exploited to generate votes.
Seems more like a counter-assault against those who use people’s tax money for white-hating, gender-nullifying, population-/life-ending/-controlling agendas the alert people reject.
If folks were really wanting to position themselves, they’d beat tariffed foreign manufacturers here… make them obsolete before they move here, and do it better.
‘Murica.
President Trump says the goal of his tariffs − resuscitating U.S. manufacturing’s glory days − will be worth the turmoil. Experts are skeptical. But, no surprise, Agent Trump didn’t put a tariff on Comrade Putin’s Russia:
From NYT: When President Trump unveiled major new tariffs on Wednesday, one big economy that he did not target was Russia.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News on Wednesday that Moscow was spared because sanctions imposed on the country after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 mean that U.S.-Russian trade had effectively stopped. North Korea, Cuba and Belarus, which are also subject to tough sanctions, were also excluded from the new levies.
Trade data paints a more complicated picture. The value of U.S. trade with Russia has fallen to its lowest level in decades following the invasion. But last year, Russia still exported about $3 billion worth of goods to the United States, according to U.S. trade figures, mostly fertilizer and platinum.
That figure is significantly higher than the value of U.S. imports from some smaller countries that Mr. Trump targeted, such as Laos and Fiji, prompting questions about whether the White House’s decision to spare Russia was a strategic choice.
Mr. Trump recently threatened to impose tariffs on buyers of Russian oil, a trade that is the lifeline of the country’s war machine, if President Vladimir V. Putin did not cooperate with U.S. efforts to broker a cease-fire in the war in Ukraine.
Mr. Trump may be holding back new economic restrictions on Russia as leverage in the peace talks. Iran, another target of Mr. Trump’s deal-making ambitions, was hit with 10 percent tariffs, the lowest tier on the White House’s list and lower than the rate imposed on Israel, a staunch U.S. ally.
The composition of Russia’s exports could have also played a role. Russia is the third largest foreign supplier of fertilizer to the United States, and the total amount of its fertilizer exports has increased over the past year.
Mr. Trump has been weighing how to protect American farmers, a key constituency, from the effects of his trade wars. Keeping the cost of fertilizer low could be part of that strategy.
I didn’t read the rest, but when negotiating a war/peace within the first 70-some-odd days of a presidency, one does not call it done quite as quickly as you seem to’ve.
Dur, man.
Liar Trump claimed he would negotiate peace between Ukraine and Russia on day one of his presidency. You’ve been blue pilled.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday gave America its largest tax increase in at least three decades — more than $2 trillion over 10 years — by imposing an across-the-board 10% levy on all imports, with higher rates on dozens more countries and a further 25% tax on all foreign cars. The 10% rate is half of the 20% that Trump mentioned on the campaign trail. It will cost U.S. importers about $2.1 trillion in additional taxes, costs passed along to consumers, according to a Tax Foundation estimate. [HuffPost]
A reminder with reference to Trump’s executive orders:
Executive orders are issued from the executive branch of the government, specifically the U.S. President. An executive order is not a law in the sense that it does not go through the legislative process. It is not binding on everyone, only on employees of the executive branch. However, executive orders are subject to judicial review after the fact (i.e. they can be declared unconstitutional by the court).
Wikipedia article with information about executive order issued by each president since Washington.
1945-1989. An on-line version of the out-of-print Codification of Presidential Proclamations and Executive Orders, which was published to provide in one reference source proclamations and executive orders with general applicability and continuing effect.
Sources of executive orders and directives. (note: some links have not been updated)
The two things about the current administration that make me say this are their immigration policy and making diversity, equity, and inclusion a thoughtcrime, both of which are most parsimoniously explained by racism.
Their immigration policy has been to energetically and indiscriminately target people of color --indiscriminate, because they’ve detained multiple US citizens, and deported people who they have later acknowledged were legally in the US and not subject to deportation. They’ve defunded refugee resettlement programs and revoked permission and cancelled flights for refugees who had already been approved to come; at the same time, they’ve created a special refugee program specifically for white South Africans.
Their DEI policy has included removing high-ranking black people for reason other than that they are black; taking down websites and banning books that recognize black individuals; and banning the use of the words “race”, “racism”, “discrimination”, and “Black”. The operating principle looks very much like discouraging the hiring, recognition, or mention of anyone who isn’t a white man.
That’s to say nothing of the personal racism of Trump, e.g. multiple lawsuits by the DOJ and NJ for discrimination against black renters and employees. His administration is also fairly lousy with racists, most glaring of which is Steven Miller, who in college collaborated with Richard Spencer to host white nationalist speakers on campus.
It’s not subtle at a personal level, and the policy is what you would expect a racist to enact.
I’m not sure this was ever really true, and it’s certainly not true any more. The Republican coalition included principled individualists/small government types, but they allied with ‘states rights’ types who want zealous intervention in people private lives but controlled at a more local level, as well as with people who don’t oppose a nanny state but joined the coalition because they didn’t like what the nanny state was doing.
But analyzing the current administration through that lens is almost nonsensical. To the extent there are principles behind their policies, they are not primarily concerned with the collective-individual axis – they’re building neo-feudalism.
This claim is a bit difficult to parse. Yes, those cities are run by Democrats. But they are relatively wealthy and have low crime rates.
Here is a county-level map of poverty rate (from wiki):
Those cities appear to be local low points for poverty rate, and roughly equal to the national average (with the exception of Detroit).
And looking in the CDC’s WONDER system (which tracks causes of death), those cities aren’t even in the top 10 counties for homicide rate. The only counties in the top 10 with more than 1m residents are St. Louis city, MO, and Hinds County MS (home of Jackson), which have Democratic mayors but are in red states.
| County | Deaths | Population | Rate (per 100k) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phillips County, AR (05107) | 65 | 99,281 | 65.50 |
| Leflore County, MS (28083) | 105 | 165,461 | 63.50 |
| Washington County, MS (28151) | 142 | 259,956 | 54.60 |
| Holmes County, MS (28051) | 52 | 99,752 | 52.10 |
| Shannon County, SD (46113) | 43 | 83,095 | 51.70 |
| St. Louis city, MO (29510) | 873 | 1,762,701 | 49.50 |
| Hinds County, MS (28049) | 638 | 1,352,170 | 47.20 |
| Wilcox County, AL (01131) | 29 | 61,655 | 47.00 |
| Petersburg city, VA (51730) | 90 | 193,491 | 46.50 |
| Lowndes County, AL (01085) | 27 | 58,800 | 45.90 |
Cities have a lot of murders, but they have low murder rates because they also have a lot of people.
I haven’t done the data work to verify this, but I would bet that by basically every metric black people are better off in proportion to how much Democratic representation they have.
I think you are misinterpreting a technical term, it’s not about owning people, it’s about people being valuable. The concept goes back to Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations (1776):
The acquisition of … talents during … education, study, or apprenticeship, costs a real expense, which is capital in [a] person. Those talents [are] part of his fortune [and] likewise that of society.
Considered that way, it seems much less sinister: one’s talents are assets, they have value, we invest in ourselves through training, and what we learn becomes part of our wealth.
nope.
Anti-Trump protesters gather in Washington, other US cities
April 5, 2025 12:21 PM EDT
Demonstrators rally against U.S. President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk during a ‘Hands Off!’ protest, in Asheville, North Carolina U.S., April 5, 2025.
Demonstrators rally against U.S. President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk during a ‘Hands Off!’ protest, in Asheville, North Carolina U.S., April 5, 2025.
- Around 1,200 demonstrations planned on Saturday in all 50 US states plus other countries
- First major opposition protest since Trump took office in January
