Are you in a swing state?
K: no one in their right mind wants a nuclear war and certainly Clinton doesn’t
want one…so let us end that nonsense… is she someone who seems to
be in favor of one military engagement after another, perhaps, but I suspect
that the office of the presidency will slow her down…
People who seem to be hell bent on actions before getting in the white house
often back away once their are in the white house… It is the nature of
responsibility… Great responsibility often forces people to hesitate in their
intended actions… I believe that she will be far less wanting to
engage in wars simply because of the awesome responsibility of the
presidency… Herr Trumpf on the other hand has no sense of
any body else on planet earth outside of Herr Trumpf…
He is far more likely to nuke the planet given his anger and
hatred and dislike of anybody who is not middle age and white…
For Herr Trumpf, the over/under for a general war with his
administration is 3 months… Meaning he would start a war within
three months and for my money, probably sooner…
Kropotkin
No, I am not.
This is very compelling, however there is no alternative. Nuclear war will come, not a result of a Super Engagement, but because of prelifiration.
It appears inavoidable, but I hope thinkers have
factored this in, as they must have, and containment, rather then MAD is the new strategic onus.
The difference between the two candidates is how they can deal with this inevidibility.
Then I would suggest that Clinton is not the only workable choice for you. Your rationale seems to be “Trump is bad”, with which I quite agree. But if you aren’t in a swing state, then voting for Clinton just because you don’t like Trump is pretty meaningless. You would have more influence voting for a third party to try to encourage a change in the long term. A viable third party could really fix politics in the US.
Perhaps. The number of independent votes are increasing, however, the percentages are still very low. That implies, people have bought into the bandwagon syndrome.
Some people view low numbers as ineffectual, in the
decreasing time frame. Green Peace suffers the
same. How much effect did a Green Peace have on the emergence of hybrid , solar and electric technology?
In a Norwegian lab, it was demonstrated that an efficient standard fuel powered car, could produce less emissions of carbohydrates then electric vehicles, factoring in the production of batteries.
Are the aims of Green Peace too ahead of it’s time?
So the general argument could be made for all independent parties. The worlds is no ready for them, society is much more conventionally oriented to buy into a less relevant and economically significant party.
In time, society, and it’s tools to achieve it’s ultimate aims could make a real difference, but until then, traditional dictates.
But to be completely honest, Carleas, the logic of 'if not him, her, make much sense.
However, all things considered, we are all bounded by such things, as for me personally, the issue which my daughter has had me swear to: Clinton’s believable promise to facilitate students who are burdened by huge student loans. My daughter’s plight has become a national ailment, and aside from the fact that I do believe in her promise in this respect, I am constrained to practice charity at home.
For me, this far outweighs the possible decades long hope in what may or may not become a possibility: the emergence of a substantial independent party.
To some, this line of argument may appear vacuous and kind of self serving, but in fact to me choosing now between an independent and Clinton, is a no brainer.
What a fucking travesty. The outcome caught me completely off guard and upended my beliefs about the electorate, the future, and our ability to really know either.
I’m glad I voted the way I did, DC came out 93% Clinton, and even thought Johnson didn’t come close to 5% it was worth the effort. But I also know know that if I’d lived in a different state, I might well have made the wrong call. Michigan was solidly predicted for Clinton.
I oscillate between wanting everything to go to shit just to show Trump voters how badly they’ve been conned, to trying to figure out how to help keep the country from going to shit, to questioning if I really know anything about what this will mean for the country.
I’m sure I’ll settle into a mode by January, but goddamn.
Oh, you guys are so naive…
I knew it was trump…
You know how in grade school, jr high, high school and college the asshole jock always gets the girl…
That’s trump
I predict that just as folks on the left felt betrayed by Obama and his pledge to change the way things are in Washington [the Bernie Sanders supporters], four years from now their equivalent on the right will feel that Trump betrayed them in turn.
With respect to both the economy and foreign policy there is a general consensus among the ruling class in America regarding the way things ought to [more or less] work.
So, how successful will Trump really be in making more than just a few dents in that?
Also, to what extent was Trump’s reactionary agenda regarding the issues that “value voters” care most about more than just campaign rhetoric?
That would seem to be considerably more problematic.
There will be new winners here and new losers. And [of course] plenty of objectivists to properly distinguish one from the other.
That never changes.
Unless of course Trump really is a fascist.
By today’s lefty standards, sure, he is a fascist but unfortunately he isn’t really fashy.
He’s more like a pre-1960s liberal and thus closer to a pre-1960s conservative than a modern establishment Republican would be.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2Sz_fTfr1E[/youtube]
I thought this at first, but Tyler Cowen made me second guess it:
I think the idea that his whole presidency will be policies funded by future presidencies makes a lot of sense. He’s going to do what makes him popular, not what is reasonable or is good in the long term. So he might well please his base, at the expense of another recession or depression as soon as someone tries to reimplement sustainable policies.
I guess we shall see.
But:
Will Trump really pursue a social agenda that, re race, gender roles, sexual politics, abortion, “law and order” etc., takes the nation back to the Fifties?
Will a revitalized left [in reacting to this] let him?
Will Trump really pursue an economic agenda that, re trade and foreign policy, upends the part that America has now come to play in today’s global economy?
Will the “powers that be” [reflected in everything from the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission to the Council On Foreign Relations] let him?
Admittedly, I don’t really follow “politics” the way I used to. So, sure, maybe my current frame of mind is informed more by the way the world used to be. If the world used to be that way at all.
The supreme irony that seems to flow from this election [for me] is how Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were more or less attacking Clinton with the same argument: That she has come [re her attachment to Goldman Sachs and its Wall Street/K Street/crony capitalism ilk] to reflect the interests of that segment of the ruling class that wants to sustain the global economy more or less as it is. And yet it is precisely those economic forces that created the conditions that led to the dismantlement of many, many industries in America.
And it was in these industries [like steel] that many blue collar folks could [through the unions] acquire employment that actually pushed them into the middle class.
Now all of that is basically gone.
Are we to believe [somehow] that Donald Trump will succeed in bringing it all back?! Or that he really even wants to?
So, we’ll see.
Even if he wanted to bring it back, there is no conceivable way he could, the miserly brand flasher he is.
If multinational corporations were put to the test by a squeeze, they could take up residence in a more favorable country. Especially when their survival was at stakes.
Let’s face it, these mammoth companies can never go from paying a dollar an hour to twenty or twenty five. They would have to forfeit their hundred million dollar bonuses and let’s face it, the wife at home is not about to give up minks, Bentleys, Frenccooks and Palm beach hideaways a few hours away by Lear jet.
No way.
Incidentally these people are far better vested then Trump, and they are the ones he really has to watch out for, not those peons who were successfully trumped into false beliefs of hope through political correctness.
Boy, I don’t envy the guy, after all he is no spring chicken. In fact I feel sorry for him, for what’s ahead, and for that, he has to become exactly what he appeared to be during the race. It will become his self constructed Iron Maiden.
As I see it, all of this is embedded in political economy. Not perhaps as Karl Marx first envisioned it, but certainly not as it is construed by the corporate media lackeys either.
Thinking About Trump and the next 4 years brings me back to a post I submitted here at ILP a few years ago.
This one:
[b]I believe that America is fully invested in preserving and sustaining its “ruling class”. And that, in so doing, it will in fact plot and plan to do things that unfold almost entirely behind the curtains. And that includes Barack Obama and most of the Democratic Party.
Now: Does it also include Donald Trump and his agenda?
But not a “ruling class” in the simplistic Marxist sense of “the class struggle”. That was more a manifestation of the industrial revolution. Capitalism today is of the crony rendition—it has evolved light years beyond that.
Indeed, in today’s world, delineating something as “the ruling class” does not mean that once a month…literally…the folks from The Mainstream Media [and their Wall Street advertisers] sit down with relevant committee chairmen in Congress, Obama’s economic team in the White House, the K Street lobbyists and Henry Kissinger’s “colleagues” from Bilderberg to meticulously plan the next month’s political and economic agenda. It doesn’t work that way. Why? Because it doesn’t have to. Besides, even within these corporate/political concoctions of wealth and power, there are considerable conflicts. For example, corporations based here in America may be strongly opposed to government policies that favor companies that shift all or part of their business overseas. And companies that oppose policies seen as favorable to the interests of oil industry do so because the higher the cost of oil the more costly it is in run their own businesses profitably. As with most things global, it’s all very, very complex. And that, of course, is where “democracy” comes into play. Democracy for the rich. But some of these conflagrations are titanic because so much money is at stake.
No, America’s ruling class does not encompass a bunch of secret meetings where secret conspirators plot and plan nefariously to carve up the world in Dr Evil’s secret location at Goldman Sachs.
Instead, the ruling class “conspiracy” narrative [mine, anyway] unfolds more like this:
From the Bullfrog Films review of the film “The American Ruling Class”:
[i]The American Ruling Class is one of the most unusual films to be made in America in recent years–both in terms of form and content. The form is a “dramatic-documentary-musical” and the content is our country’s most taboo topic: class, power and privilege in our nominally democratic republic.
At bottom the film is a morality tale, the story of two Yale students (played by Harvard men) who seek their opportunities upon graduation. As the renowned essayist, author and longtime Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham conducts them through the corridors of power: Pentagon press briefings, the World Economic Forum, philanthropic foundations, Washington law firms, corporations, banks, the Council on Foreign Relations, and New York society dinners–our two representative graduates “one rich and the other not so rich” must struggle with their responsibilities in “a world collaterally damaged by the magic of money and the miracles of science.” The real-life luminaries they meet on their journey become characters in a story about power, its responsibilities and abuses.
All the while “the Mighty Wurlitzer” plays on, a reference to the massive propaganda apparatus invented by the CIA’s Frank Wisner, here used to signify the nocturnal philosophy of acquisition and imperial hubris which continually calls to the young men, the siren song of careerist myopia that was bred into their bones at school.
As we watch these two young men wend their way through what is only a slight fictionalization of their actual lives and choices, as we meet former Secretaries of State and Defense, directors of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, the publisher of The New York Times, Kurt Vonnegut, Howard Zinn, Barbara Ehrenreich, Robert Altman and a host of others, we have to ask along with Mr. Lapham: “To what end the genius of the Wall Street banks and the force of the Pentagon’s colossal weapons? Where does America discover the wisdom to play with its wonderful toys?” The possible answers move beyond the empty distinction of party affiliation and into the heart of American Oligarchy itself. By film’s end, the young men must decide: Should they seek to rule the world, or to save it?[/i]
In this context, crucial aspects of American foreign and domestic policy are in fact rooted in political economy, in crony capitalism, in stuff that really does unfold behind the curtains.
Obama Inc. fits quite comfortably into this carefully calibrated cache. His first administration was veritably bursting at the seams with men and women of this ilk. For example, Bilderberg, CFR, TC folks alone included Hillary Clinton [and Bill of course], Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Rahm Emanuel, George Mitchell, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker, Robert Gates, James Jones, Tom Daschle, Eric Shinseki, Michael Froman, Susan Rice, Jack Reed, Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, Mona Sutphen.
How then will Trump Inc. fit into all of this?
It is just commonsense to point out that those who own and operate the political and economic instruments that sustain the global economy, are going to want to connect the dots with others like them around the world. They have “shared interests” that evolve from and center around transactions that swell well up into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
So, no, they don’t need to schedule a secret rendezvous where they can exchange secret handshakes and secret code words with the other secret participants.
If you grasp the manner in which these folks get together to sustain their own interests you begin to get a clearer sense of why a “progressive” agenda hardly ever comes up at all. Well, other than as rhetorical camouflage to dupe the unabashed liberal intellectuals who still believe that ObamaLand and BushWorld and TrumpInc are the antithesis of each other.
And yet, with respect to many social issues, they really are, right?
And while it is true the neoconservatives in the ruling class disdain these “internationalists”, they are both attached at the hip to Wall Street and the military industrial complex. [/b]
It is in this context that I will be following TrumpInc.
This is a very probable assessment. Political nativism aside, all the red neck rhetoric meant for his base of below the threshold of even moderate understanding, generally, what is an additional adjunctive, in re: to how he would handle them is not a brainer to figure.
He said he will increase taxes across the board except the upper level, who will again be supported , by a renewed extension of trickle down economics.
How will this play out? The very sharp increase will fund as corporate ‘incentives’ to have them re-fubd local labor. Huge injections of capital can refund these places to benefit those ardent supporters who brought him into office, with what may appear as a drastic repatriation of jobs. But these happy times , may not be substantiated far in to the future, if, some very subtle and newly disguised outsourcing can’t be contemporaneously effected. In fact he will be able to pull it off with a kind of hybrid, albeit veiled economy.
The middle class will have to bear the expenditures necessary, and this too, will be done on the fine letter part of the tax code.
And so goes all the other effects of Make America Great Again. There will be huge social demotions of the American classes generally, all happily employed, but payday more and more resembling Walmart type employment benefits.
I’m one of those rednecks and I reckon I could demolish literally anyone or even teams of people on this site in a debate.
Remember, it was my area who voted for him the most. We produce some very intelligent people, but it was Bill Clinton that destroyed the industrial base here, and we were still under the Democratic party for years after in the hope they would do something right.
They never did, only got worst and worst. Are we wrong for saying never a Democrat again? Maybe we made a very sane and rational choice? I’m a intellectual from the industrial heart (what is left of it) in the state that supported him at the highest rates.
Your redneck analogy would have to apply to me. How well do you think all the Hillary supporters could hold up in a no holds bar debate against me? I’m exceptional well red, traveled the whole country, made the study of statecraft the center of my philosophy. I’m one of those rednecks, and correctly identified his policies months before he announced them here. I used rhetorical methods parallel to his long before this election cycle on this very forum, and when he came along (I supported Carson at the time) I pointed out he used a very similar system, and that he would win the debates, and the election.
He did. In order to pass off Trump, you gotta pass me off as well, and while I make it easy for a shallow person to pass me off for my name, as it seems it is a mere joke, I’ve proven time and again I’m very well aware of current events, national and international, historical events the world over, as well as philosophy. I’ve torn quite a few assholes out over the years.
I’m one of those red necks. You wouldn’t be able to Puck me out of that crowd. Consider this next time you denigrate half the country as inferior, I can show very much I’m the superior of any person here. There isn’t a person alive who could survive a full blown intellectual contest with me. Not a university, in any country, with any fancy degree or IQ. I’m quite confident of those rednecks, and our ability to stand toe to toe with the supposed best. I wasn’t exactly impressed with my tours of America.
You, pollsters, the mainstream media, the DNC, and more than a few Republicans.
Not by the Trump campaign.
Yeah, focus on that one. If the DNC wants to have any influence in this country again, thery’re going to have to rethink everything.
This is so amazing. I wish The GOP would have focused a bit more on how great it’s going to be to have Republicans running the House, Senate, Presidency, appointing judges, appointing a cabinet, holding 2/3rds of the Govenorships, and etc., instead of making it soully about whether or not Trump himself is wonderful. I suppose though, if they would have reminded people of the full importanceof this election, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein may not have gotten enough votes to stop Hillary.
Of course Trump is really a fascist given that ‘fascist’ is just another word that means “Anybody a liberal doesn’t like.” The only thing he could do to not be called a fascist is apologize for his life and beg Hillary to take the Presidency from him.
I did warn you guys that there is a way for Trump to win despite the most clever intentions. Cleverness means complexity. And complexity means surprises. He actually had two ways to ensure victory. He fell toward the lesser … could have done even far better. 
Proving he is a fox, better then that a cunning, crazy as a fox, advantage seeker.
But the other side of this simple logic? For surely there is the other side, well, that’s what to watch for, and it may give pause, or SUPRISE!