The Chinese will end up negotiating a deal with regard to the tariff issue so it looks like tRump has a win. China has a too good to be true scenario on its hands: a not very bright 12 year old boy is POTUS. China is not going to rock that boat. Watch for North Korea for do something similar.

This is all pretty much coming down to who wins the midterms, the Mueller report and then what.

Anarchistbear said:

---

Trump is the least of our problems. He is the id of America, emblematic of a rotten system where people have been and will continue to be marginalized by the nexus of the two political parties and their corporate masters. Until there is a grassroots movement to overthrow them, this will continue but with a slightly more benign face. The Tea Party and OWS were fits and starts but Trump may have actually precipitated more activism than we've seen in 50 years.

There are some hopeful signs-the rising of teachers unions and resistance in Oklahoma and West Virginia; plus, election of thirty five members of the Democratic socialist party in 2018 is not a normal year. The election of Conor Lamb in a district Clinton lost big was huge as was Doug Jones victory. Both were powered by local uprisings-white working class and labor in PA and in Alabama, labor and African Americans. And both were also reactions against DC. What is happening in France with general strikes and Macron on the ropes is also encouraging. The rise of right wing nationalism has peaked. The pendulum is moving and hopefully this time people don't settle for Neo-liberal bulls$it.

---

Whenever people use the word "Neo-liberal" I always wonder what they are talking about. To me it's like the phrase "virtue signaling". I think it's supposed to imply some big meaning, but I don't know what it is.

dajo9 said:

---

Anarchistbear said:

---

Trump is the least of our problems. He is the id of America, emblematic of a rotten system where people have been and will continue to be marginalized by the nexus of the two political parties and their corporate masters. Until there is a grassroots movement to overthrow them, this will continue but with a slightly more benign face. The Tea Party and OWS were fits and starts but Trump may have actually precipitated more activism than we've seen in 50 years.

There are some hopeful signs-the rising of teachers unions and resistance in Oklahoma and West Virginia; plus, election of thirty five members of the Democratic socialist party in 2018 is not a normal year. The election of Conor Lamb in a district Clinton lost big was huge as was Doug Jones victory. Both were powered by local uprisings-white working class and labor in PA and in Alabama, labor and African Americans. And both were also reactions against DC. What is happening in France with general strikes and Macron on the ropes is also encouraging. The rise of right wing nationalism has peaked. The pendulum is moving and hopefully this time people don't settle for Neo-liberal bulls$it.

---

Whenever people use the word "Neo-liberal" I always wonder what they are talking about. To me it's like the phrase "virtue signaling". I think it's supposed to imply some big meaning, but I don't know what it is.

---

I just want to lay down a marker:

Power is a function of agreement. No kidding; no B.S. Money is powerful because people, by and large, believe in it.

I have often thought that there is no amount of money that is too large for me to think of good, productive, moral, generally helpful, effective ways to use it (i.e., without conspicuous consumption, using it for oppression, destructive monopoly capital, etc., etc., etc,, etc.).

What political history has shown us is that, when the system ceases to make sense for enough people, anti-system pressures build up, to the point where the system gets broken. The rise of capitalism occurred against the increasing anachronism of the feudal system which preceded it, which system was originally built on military prowess, but which capitalism eventually overthrew because the expense of military prowess eventually put the real power into the hands of the people who were in fact paying for it (and making a profit from it), such that the warriors (whose standing depended on military prowess) became more and more irrelevant.

Those who created the carnage of WWI (and its denouement in WWII) unfortunately had not understood this. Wilson understood it; but the vast majority of even the American body politic did not. Trump does not; and his base certainly does not.

I come off Anarchist's basic premise (that the large percentage of our society have been left behind by the failure of the re-distributive values of the Rooseveltian Democratic Party to find sufficient political coherence to allow the government to make the changes that are necessary and possible to adjust to the advances of technology and capital, in order to ameliorate the effects of the rush of the country's wealth to the top 1% at the exclusion of such a large percentage of the people, which is capitalism's, dog-eat-dog, natural tendency - necessary and possible changes that only the government could do, because they make no sense for capitalists to do, when their only meaningful goal is to gobble up as much capital as possible against whomever else might compete for it.

With that in mind, what the New Dealers were able to do (eventually with the major boost from WWII) is create perhaps the most major re-distribution of wealth/power/opportunity in history, essentially by doing a whole bunch of things that the private sector alone could not do; and the way they did this INCLUDED due respect for what the government CANNOT do (i.e., as Marx put it, control the means of production) - a political understanding built into the structure of the country by, among other things, the freedoms of the Bill of Rights (especially the First Amendment) AND (not ever to be forgotten) the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

SO, the way this country has to work (if it is going to work at all) is by means of creative tension (and see-saw for power) between the public sector (which has, by definition and necessity, to represent the whole) and the private sector (which gets to pick and choose its customers, and use the money in any way the individual capitalists see fit for their own benefit, thereby creating the growing wealth that is necessary for the upward mobility of the masses of people); and the current political problem is that money, more and more, is finding ways of controlling the public sector to a degree which more and more tends to make our democracy a sham; and the problem in dealing with that is that it does no good to pretend that there is something wrong with having money and the power it brings, or, worse, to try to pretend that the power of money does not, or can be made not, to exist, because it is too realistically meaningful to all of us.

Nevertheless, right now, something has to emerge that can restore enough democratic power to the public sector to make the changes necessary to keep the society in balance. Hitler and Stalin did it by taking all the power to themselves, oppressing everyone else, and paying off the capitalists with enough military spending (an eventually self-defeating strategy, economically, because of its non-productive nature - even if he hadn't been defeated militarily). Trump's instincts are along those lines, but he's too stupid to know how ridiculously hopeless that would be in this country (without an otherwise total collapse of its institutions resulting in absolute economic devastation), and he has no clue what to do with public sector power anyhow. The same is generally true of Republican policies. And the Democrats, having become too beholden to the power of money in politics, have not been able to institute most of the policies that could actually work, with the major effect of creating a huge political void of people left behind to whom only Trump was able to speak effectively.

So, how does the Democratic Party (with and/or without other political forces on the left) free itself enough from the demands of the capitalist donor/masters to both get into power then to hold power for long enough to do the things that capitalists don't like (because they don't involve the capitalists making money directly from them - even though these things in the longer run distribute the wealth and power in the society further and wider and in so doing create the customers the capitalists need in order to feed their natural tendency to grow wealth in the aggregate?

The things to which Anarchist points are "points of light". The question: Can they continue to grow?, or will they either be stamped out or wither on the vine for lack of organic compost?

That's the question.

dajo9 said:

---

Whenever people use the word "Neo-liberal" I always wonder what they are talking about. To me it's like the phrase "virtue signaling". I think it's supposed to imply some big meaning, but I don't know what it is.

---

Sounds like a personal problem

Quote:

---

Neoliberalism is an economic ideology centered around the values of a global economy, or globalization: free market, free trade, and the unrestricted flow of capital.

---

iwantwinners said:

---

dajo9 said:

---

Whenever people use the word "Neo-liberal" I always wonder what they are talking about. To me it's like the phrase "virtue signaling". I think it's supposed to imply some big meaning, but I don't know what it is.

---

Sounds like a personal problem

Quote:

---

Neoliberalism is an economic ideology centered around the values of a global economy, or globalization: free market, free trade, and the unrestricted flow of capital.

---

---

In the old days we used to call that capitalism. I guess people wanted to criticize it so they attached a "liberal" label on it

I don't think it has anything to do with liberal politics per se, but rather the "liberalization" (opening to new ways of doing things, discarding of traditional ways) of the economy towards globalization (liberalizing the market economy to incorporate the global economy rather than strictly domestic). It means different things to different people as most things do, but I view it as the advocation of global economy -- exploiting cheap labor markets.

Again, sounds like a personal problem. I'm not big on the epistemology of catch-terms, so I don't spend much time dwelling on inferring the hidden meaning of phrases

Hmm kay

Guns didn't make America great. Jazz made America great.

I thought it was biding our time during wwii as the rest of the world destroyed themselves, then jumping in late, taking the credit, and dictating favorable terms to the other countries.

Which era? Early or Swing or Be Bop

West Coast baby!

Lol

Best Jazz album All Time; Best Jazz band line up All Time:



Jazz God John Coltrane once said of Stan Getz: "We'd all sound like that if we could."

John Brennan, self-described in his Twitter bio as a "Nonpartisan American who is very concerned about our collective future."

his music made me switch from trumpet to tenor sax

one of my wake up cuts

Beautiful music, wonderful artists, all of whom would have rejected Trump's invitation to perform at his inauguration alongside 3 Doors Down and The Piano Guys.

going4roses said:

---

one of my wake up cuts

---

Cuban music is an endless river of incredible depth

While I'm at it: Check out Kareem's article about Roseanne in the Hollywood Reporter.

You are the biggest user of catch terms on this site by far.

Neo-liberal = capitalist. Got it.

"THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated" Thomas Paine (written on a drum head), reporting on Washington's retreat preliminary to the pivotal Battle of Trenton.

https://usat.ly/2ElQ2RN

"The dispossessed of this nation the poor, both white and Negro live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.

The only real revolutionary, people say, is a man who has nothing to lose. "

I'm sure he finds the Constitution boring, too.

Another hour, another bald-faced lie.

Former CIA Director John Brennan tore into President Trump after the president shared a right-leaning poll that showed his approval rating rising above 50 percent.
"I served 6 Presidents, 3 Rs & 3Ds. I directly supported Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama," Brennan tweeted late Wednesday night.
"While I didn't agree with all their policy choices, I admired and respected all of them, as they put country above their personal interests. Not so with you, as your self adoration is disgraceful."

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odiousmakes you so sick at heart that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."
Mario Savio

The impact of retaliation by China could drown out the GOP message that tax cuts are delivering prosperity, which the party is counting on to save their majorities in the House and Senate," per Bloomberg's Sahil Kapur.
And China's threats of retaliation are scaring farmers in the GOP's rural base and across Trump country, creating a potential drag for Republicans in November's midterms. Bloomberg's Josh Green

Bending over to China is the path of least resistance. Let's not rock the boat! Lol

Modern day presidential.

I imagine tRump's trade war has caused more than a few fellas to recalibrate their retirement date.

bearister said:

---

The impact of retaliation by China could drown out the GOP message that tax cuts are delivering prosperity, which the party is counting on to save their majorities in the House and Senate," per Bloomberg's Sahil Kapur.
And China's threats of retaliation are scaring farmers in the GOP's rural base and across Trump country, creating a potential drag for Republicans in November's midterms. Bloomberg's Josh Green

---

Well, the tax cuts didn't help them in the special elections, to the point that in the Pennsylvania special election, they stopped talking about them all together by march, and instead focused on immigration.

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/6/17179690/tax-cut-message-republican-race-attacks-2018