Politics & Stuff

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

7 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

You quote the same post of mine twice because you think your second quote is more clever.
That's a cheat.

Your posts are so salient and accurate, they sometimes warrant another examination

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

14 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

He did n't say that.
Also Oedipus the man did n't know he was doing that. He did n't know Jocasta was his mother.

You had to edit that ?

[Vesper 30,231]

To understand the U.S. economic success is to love Harris’s plan

Kamala Harris’s economic proposals would build on the remarkable U.S. comeback since the pandemic.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/27/kamala-harris-economic-proposals/

Despite the compulsion of Republican MAGA voices to run down the country’s economic strength, the U.S. recovery over the past few years has been nothing short of miraculous.

“Policymakers in the United States and other major economies have quelled the worst inflation in four decades without tumbling into recession,” The Post reported on Oct. 22, citing the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF “also raised its forecast for U.S. economic growth over the next two years, confirming that the world’s largest economy has enjoyed the strongest recovery from the pandemic of any advanced nation.”

The United States achieved that enviable position because an independent Federal Reserve held the line on inflation; President Joe Biden pushed through major legislation that made huge investments in infrastructure and new technology (and induced the private sector to do the same); and other policies freed up consumer spending (by, among other things, saving consumers $1 billion in drug costs and providing a substantial stimulus).

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen this week cautioned about blowing up the progress already made. “From day one, we rejected isolationism that made America and the world worse off and pursued global economic leadership that supports economies around the world and brings significant benefits to the American people and the U.S. economy,” she said.

Yellen credited the symbiotic relationship between the federal government and private sector, noting that on green energy, “public investments have been met by more than five times as much in private investment.”Following

To review: Don’t go protectionist; rather than giving giant tax cuts for the rich and corporations, make massive, job-producing investments, leave the Federal Reserve alone and help juice consumer spending.

That successful formula explains why Vice President Kamala Harris’s economic plans, building on that successful approach, is vastly preferable to Donald Trump’s formula (protectionism, massive tax cuts for the rich, undoing the Inflation Reduction Act, etc.). Plenty of economists agree.

Take, for example, a survey of 39 economists by the Wall Street Journal, Steven Rattner recently wrote online.

Harris’s “proposal for a $6,000 tax credit for newborns won 74% approval, her plan to increase the corporate tax rate was favored by 59%, and the concept of capping insulin prices at $35 for all garnered the support of 64%. (Capping out-of-pocket spending on all prescription drugs was essentially a tie.)”

He added, “In contrast, only 8% favored making Trump’s tax cuts permanent, not a single economist favored his tariff plan, and just 5% supported eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits.” By one estimate, Trump’s tariff plan alone would cut gross domestic product by nearly 9 percent.

Likewise, a letter from 23 Nobel Prize-winning economists (separate from the 82 Nobelists who endorsed her on Thursday) explained: “His policies, including high tariffs even on goods from our friends and allies and regressive tax cuts for corporations and individuals, will lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality.

Among the most important determinants of economic success are the rule of law and economic and political certainty, and Trump threatens all of these.” Harris’s middle-class focused policies, they argued, “will do far more than Donald Trump’s to increase the economic strength and well-being of our nation and its people.”

If you understand what worked, you can understand why Harris’s proposed investments (e.g., in housing, in start-up businesses, in 21st-century technologies), plan to extend prescription drug savings and added help for consumers (e.g., child tax credit, another $6000 baby tax credit) is more likely to produce similarly successful results than a plan that does the opposite of what worked (ending Biden-Harris era investments and drug cost controls, giving tax breaks focused on top income earners, politicizing the Fed and protectionism).

The Biden-Harris administration tapped into the great American economic success story. The Economist, reviewing the U.S. success over decades, put it succinctly: “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust.”

The Economist pointed out: “On a per-person basis, American economic output is now about 40% higher than in western Europe and Canada, and 60% higher than in Japan — roughly twice as large as the gaps between them in 1990.”

And then there’s this: “Average wages in America’s poorest state, Mississippi, are higher than the averages in Britain, Canada and Germany.”

In running down America and its economy, Trump and his MAGA minions overlook the assets that have helped the nation achieve economic dominance. (The Economist again: “the world’s deepest financial markets has made it easier for startups to raise equity,” “the plethora of exciting young companies,” the dollar’s function as the world’s reserve currency, “the world’s best universities, which remain so in part by attracting the world’s best students.”)

Frankly, if Americans better understood the U.S. economic success and the policies that helped deliver it, they might better appreciate why Harris’s plan is so highly praised by economists and Trump’s is so criticized.

If nothing else, Trump’s tariff plan — the same sort that helped usher in recessions in the 1890s and the 1930s — should be reason to reject his scheme.

Voters have a choice: Harris’s formula that helped bring about a historic recovery (building on America’s extraordinary economic success story) or one that is nearly guaranteed, as history shows, to risk economic disaster.

[cosmicway 1,333]

4 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

You had to edit that ?

Yes because you don't know the story.
How can the "Oedipodian syndrome" refer to what you say when Oedipus was not aware ?

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

1 minute ago, cosmicway said:

Yes because you don't know the story.
How can the "Oedipodian syndrome" refer to what you say when Oedipus was not aware ?

The whole concept of using a Greek fairy tale to compose psychoanalytic theory whilst off your nut on marching powder is utterly retarded. 

[cosmicway 1,333]

3 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

whilst off your nut on marching powder is utterly retarded. 

nicht firstainhud

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

8 minutes ago, cosmicway said:

nicht firstainhud

Amazing that you can speak German. Well one word anyway, the second doesn't exist. 

[NikkiCFC 8,337]

23 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

You read too much Sigmund Freud. 

What have I done with this comment 😱

[robsblubot 3,595]

1 hour ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Thats true. Mates a builder working with an Albanian who is a Flat Earther. There is a whole new Flat earth believing group, utter nonsense.

My mate took a picture of Earth from the Space station into work - his colleague said its all fake. 🤪

Great analogy. 🙄

[Fulham Broadway 17,333]

12 minutes ago, robsblubot said:

Great analogy. 🙄

Yes I thought so too

[cosmicway 1,333]

There are some folks though who will resist even irrefutable maths.
They believe they can win in the casino roulette.
I explain them.
They say they understand then shake their head and say "... yes but real life is not maths".
What real life ?
They come down from the mountain skint.
But they don't give up.
It's something very peculiar.

If you believe Panathinaikos can beat Chelsea it's not so bad - they have done it once against Arsenal, Olympiakos last year against Aston Villa and Villa was a very tired team but a win is a win.
Let that be - believe.
But this one ? How do you explain ?


 

[Vesper 30,231]

Kamala Harris Asks Americans: Are You Really Going to Elect a Guy Who Has Good Things to Say About Hitler?

You'd think this would be an easy answer, and yet...

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/kamala-harris-asks-americans-are-you-really-going-to-elect-a-guy-who-has-good-things-to-say-about-hitler

 

With 13 days to go until the election, Kamala Harris laid out in the starkest terms possible the choice Americans face when they head to the ballot box in less than two weeks: They can vote to elect a man who thinks Adolph Hilter is someone to emulate, or they can vote for a woman who has never said a good thing about a genocidal maniac.

Speaking outside the Naval Observatory on Wednesday, Harris responded to a new story from The Atlantic detailing Donald Trump’s infatuation with dictators, the negative things he has allegedly had to say about members of the armed forces, and the positive remarks he has allegedly made about people like Hitler, all of which he of course denies.

“Yesterday, we learned that Donald Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly, a retired four-star general, confirmed that while Donald Trump was president, he said he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler had,” Harris told reporters. “Donald Trump said that because he does not want a military that is loyal to the United States Constitution. He wants a military that is loyal to him. He wants a military who will be loyal to him personally, one that will obey his orders even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the Constitution of the United States. In just the past week, Donald Trump has repeatedly called his fellow Americans the ‘enemy from within’ and even said that he would use the United States military to go after American citizens.”

She continued: “And let’s be clear about who he considers to be the enemy from within. Anyone who refuses to bend a knee or dares to criticize him would qualify, in his mind, as the enemy within, like judges, like journalists, like nonpartisan election officials. It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans. All of this is further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is. This is a window into who Donald Trump really is from the people who know him best, from the people who worked with him side by side in the Oval Office and in the Situation Room.”

Harris added that Kelly has said Trump meets the definition of a fascist, and would rule like one if given the chance. The vice president ended her remarks by telling voters: “Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable. And in a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions. Those who once tried to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses would no longer be there and no longer be there to rein him in.

“So, the bottom line is this. We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question in 13 days will be: What do the American people want?”

 

Right now, alarmingly, the answer is not clear.

 

Republican lawmaker not going to hold Hitler comments against Trump because he expects that kind of thing from the ex-president

 

Elsewhere!

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Her billionaire marriage broke up. Her VP campaign fizzled. Now she’s a Trump-world star.

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As Democratic icons stump for Harris, GOP elders keep distance from Trump

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[NikkiCFC 8,337]

7 hours ago, cosmicway said:

1.30 maybe but I not in the last days - in July, August.
In the last days it was something like 1.90 - 2.20 as I recall.
Anyway 1.50 is strong as elections go.

This is on the day of election in 2016. 

https://qz.com/830626/election-2016-uk-betting-for-the-us-election-is-set-to-beat-records

Clinton is currently trading at 1.20 on Betfair, giving her an 83% chance of being elected according to those odds. In 2012, president Barack Obama was trading at 1.31 the day before election day, giving him around 76% chance of becoming president. There’s far less enthusiasm for Republican Donald Trump, who is trading at 5.80, with a 17% chance of being elected.

 

Edited October 27, 2024 by NikkiCFC

[Vesper 30,231]

How Trump could use the military to go after the 'radical left'

The military isn't supposed to police Americans, but there are exceptions.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/could-trump-use-military-go-after-radical-left/story?id=114806253

 

Former President Donald Trump says active-duty or National Guard troops could be used to go after "radical left lunatics" to handle any Election Day chaos, warning that the bigger problem facing the United States isn't a foreign enemy but "the people from within."

The suggestion of using military force following a political election is hypothetical, considering Trump won't have command of U.S. troops in November. If he wins the election, Trump wouldn't gain control of the armed forces until mid-January following the inauguration.

But deploying the military within U.S. borders is a suggestion Trump has made before, including the idea that the military could police the southern border and help deport an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Trump continues to demonize migrants, falsely claims they're 'building an army'

"I think the bigger problem are the people from within," Trump told Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures."

"We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics... And it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or really necessary by the military, because they can't let that happen," he said.

So, can a president use U.S. troops to police Americans and quash political protests?

Many of Trump's supporters say yes, citing a 200-year-old law meant to curb rebellions. The Insurrection Act of 1807 was used during the Civil War and throughout the 1960s to enforce civil rights laws.

Legal experts are now warning the law is dangerously vague and ripe for abuse.

Here's what to know about the use of military power on U.S. soil:

The military is barred from the daily policing of Americans. But it can be used to quell rebellions

The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act mostly prohibits active-duty military troops from carrying out law enforcement duties inside the United States.

The idea behind the law is that any president -- as commander in chief of U.S. forces -- shouldn't be allowed to use federal military might against its own citizens.

But it's a different law that was passed earlier that century that's caught the attention of many Trump supporters.

First enacted in 1807, the Insurrection Act says the president can call on a militia or the U.S. armed forces if there's been "any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy" in a state that "opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws."

The Insurrection Act has been used dozens of times throughout history, but not by Trump

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the law has been invoked dozens of times throughout history, including by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and by Lyndon B. Johnson to quell rioting after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the law to deploy members of the Army's 101st Airborne Division to escort nine Black students into Little Rock Central High School, after the Arkansas governor used the state's National Guard to prevent the students from entering the school.

More recently, the law was invoked by President George H.W. Bush during the 1992 riots in Los Angeles that followed the trial acquittal of police officers in the Rodney King case. The law was also under consideration in 2005 following Hurricane Katrina, but was not used.

In the days leading up to the Jan. 6 riot, some Trump supporters wanted the president to invoke the Insurrection Act as a justification for far-right militia groups to storm the Capitol and to keep Trump in power despite losing the election.

Trump falsely claimed he won the election, but never invoked the Insurrection Act while in office.

Experts warn the law is dangerously vague

Legal experts have proposed reforms to the Insurrection Act, including one proposal earlier this year by the American Law Institute.

"There is agreement on both sides of the aisle that the Insurrection Act gives any president too much unchecked power," Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and former assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, said last April.

It's unlikely, though, that such a sharply divided Congress would take up the issue any time soon.

There's another law, too, that Trump could try to rely on when it comes to handling illegal immigration -- the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which allows the president to deport any noncitizen from a country that the U.S. is at war with.

In his interview with Time magazine this year, Trump didn't cite a legal justification when he said he'd use the National Guard to conduct mass deportations and create detention camps for people living illegally inside the U.S.

In the end, whether any of Trump's proposals are legal would likely be determined by the courts, including federal judges he appointed.

[cosmicway 1,333]

10 hours ago, NikkiCFC said:

This is on the day of election in 2016. 

https://qz.com/830626/election-2016-uk-betting-for-the-us-election-is-set-to-beat-records

Clinton is currently trading at 1.20 on Betfair, giving her an 83% chance of being elected according to those odds. In 2012, president Barack Obama was trading at 1.31 the day before election day, giving him around 76% chance of becoming president. There’s far less enthusiasm for Republican Donald Trump, who is trading at 5.80, with a 17% chance of being elected.

 

Betfair is blacked out in Greece.
I was watching oddschecker.com and it was like I say above.
Betfair is sometimes strange.
Now what do they say ?

[Vesper 30,231]

Trump fills Madison Square Garden with anger, vitriol and racist threats

Marking final stretch of campaign in New York, Trump and cabal of surrogates attack Harris and mock Puerto Rico

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/27/trump-madison-square-garden-rally

Anger and vitriol took center stage at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, as Donald Trump and a cabal of campaign surrogates held a rally marked by racist comments, coarse insults, and dangerous threats about immigrants.

Nine days out from the election, Trump used the rally in New York to repeat his claim that he is fighting “the enemy within” and again promised to launch “the largest deportation program in American history”, amid incoherent ramblings about ending a phone call with a “very, very important person” so he could watch one of Elon Musk’s rockets land.

The event at Madison Square Garden, in the center of Manhattan, had drawn comparisons to an infamous Nazi rally held at the arena in 1939. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ running mate, said there was a “direct parallel” between the two events, and the Democratic National Committee projected images on the outside of the building on Sunday repeating claims from Trump’s former chief-of-staff that Trump had “praised Hitler”.

There was certainly a dark tone throughout the hours-long rally, with one speaker describing Puerto Rico, home to 3.2m US citizens, as an “island of garbage”; Tucker Carlson mocking Harris’ racial identity; a radio host describing Hillary Clinton as a “sick bastard”; and a crucifix-wielding childhood friend of Trump’s declaring that Harris is “the antichrist”.

The Puerto Rico comments, made by Tony Hinchliffe, a podcaster with a history of racist remarks, were immediately criticized by the Harris-Walz campaign. Ricky Martin, the Puerto Rican popstar who has more than 18m followers on Instagram, wrote in a post: “This is what they think of us. Vote for @kamalaharris.”

Trump campaign spokesperson Danielle Alvarez in a statement said “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

But that could prove problematic in Pennsylvania, where the majority of the swing state’s 580,000 eligible Latino voters are of Puerto Rican descent. Both campaigns have been trying to appeal to Latino voters in the final weeks of the campaign, and Harris had visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia earlier on Sunday, where she outlined plans to introduce an “economic opportunity taskforce” for Puerto Rico.

The pugnacious mood didn’t change once Trump began speaking, as the former president quickly repeated his pledge to “launch the largest deportation program in American history”.

Trump continued his frequent rants about immigration and claimed that a “savage Venezuelan prison gang” had “taken over Times Square”, which will come as a surprise to anyone who has recently visited the New York landmark. The former president also stated, wrongly, that the Biden administration did not have money to respond to a recent hurricane in North Carolina because “they spent all of their money bringing in illegal immigrants, flying them in by beautiful jet planes”.

Trump’s usual dystopian threats were on offer, as the 78-year-old expanded on his claims about “the enemy within” – a group of political opponents that he has said he will set the military on if elected.

“We’re just not running against Kamala. I think a lot of our politicians here tonight know this. She means nothing, she’s purely a vessel that’s all she is,” Trump said.

“We’re running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala and far more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious radical-left machine that runs today’s Democrat party. They’re just vessels.”

Trump’s appearance at Madison Square Garden – home to the New York Knicks and Rangers, and venue for countless legendary acts including Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and John Lennon’s last concert appearance before his murder – marks the culmination of his peculiar love-hate flirtation with his native city. Despite the fact that he has no chance of winning New York state – Harris is 15 points ahead in the Five Thirty Eight tracker poll – this was his third rally here this year.

In May he made an audacious attempt to woo Black and Latino voters in the south Bronx, just a few miles from his childhood home in Queens. Then in September, he pitched up in the New York City suburbs in Long Island.

What Trump intends by staging this trilogy of seemingly pointless electoral appearances is unclear. He has used his rambling speeches to take a nostalgic walk down memory lane to what he sees as the golden days of his life as a New York real estate magnate.

But he has also portrayed New York City in the most dark and dystopian terms, as a rat-infested haven for drug addicts, gangs and “illegal aliens” housed in luxury apartments while military veterans shiver on the sidewalks. His toxic language is perhaps a reflection of his bitterness towards the city of his birth, which in separate court cases has convicted him of 34 felonies, found his company the Trump Organization guilty of criminal tax fraud, and found him personally liable for sexual abuse.

On Sunday Trump again criticized his home town, claiming that the Biden administration had forced “hundreds of thousands of really rough people” into the city and telling New Yorkers, despite police saying crime has declined: “Your crime is through the roof. Everything is through the roof.”

The pugnacious tone had been set earlier in the afternoon, when several of the opening speakers made obscenity-laced and hate-filled remarks.

Hinchcliffe’s comments about Puerto Rico – he also made lewd sexual innuendos about Latina women – were met with big laughs from the crowd. A comment from radio personality Sid Rosenberg that Hillary Clinton is a “sick bastard” was similarly well received, as was Rosenberg’s claim that “the fucking illegals get everything they want”.

David Rem, a Republican politician who the Trump campaign described as a childhood friend of the former president, called Harris “the devil” and “the antichrist”, to loud cheers. Rem later took a crucifix out of his pocket and announced that he was running for New York City mayor.

As soon as Trump announced his intention to stage a rally at Madison Square Garden just days before the election, critics leapt to point out historical parallels with one of the most notorious events in New York history. On 20 February 1939, just seven months before Germany invaded Poland, the pro-Hitler German American Bund held a mass Nazi rally in the exact same arena.

The organizers chose George Washington’s birthday as the date to parade their vision of an Aryan Christian country dedicated to white supremacy and American patriotism. They erected a giant portrait of Washington, which they flanked with swastika flags alongside the stars and stripes.

More than 20,000 American Nazi sympathisers attended, many dressed in storm trooper uniforms and giving the Sieg Heil salute. The “Führer” of the American Bund, Fritz Kuhn, told the crowd that America would be “returned to the people who founded it”, and decried the “Jewish controlled press”.

Hillary Clinton had noted the similarities between the two events in an interview with CNN last week, and at a rally in Nevada earlier on Sunday, Walz was happy to continue the comparison.

“Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden,” Walz said.

“There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden. And don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there.”

The Trump campaign reacted furiously to the accusations, describing Clinton’s comments as “disgusting”. One of the few people to reference the 1939 rally on Sunday was Hulk Hogan, who emerged to wrestling music, spent several seconds struggling to rip off his shirt, then claimed: “I don’t see no stinkin’ Nazis in here”.

After a night of fire and fury, it will be up to the American voters to decide.

 

Trump rally speakers lob racist insults, call Puerto Rico ‘island of garbage’

Later, Trump took the stage at Madison Square Garden and called the GOP “the party of inclusion.” His campaign issued a statement disavowing the “garbage” comment.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/27/trump-msg-rally-puerto-ricans/

NEW YORK — A comedian who warmed up the crowd at Donald Trump’s rally here Sunday described Puerto Rico as an “island of garbage,” attracting widespread criticism.

The comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe of the “Kill Tony” podcast, was one of several opening speakers who lobbed sexist, racist and otherwise demeaning insults at a variety of targets during a Madison Square Garden rally meant to showcase Trump’s broad-based support in the home stretch of the presidential campaign.

 

Pennsylvania, perhaps the most critical swing state, is home to one of the largest populations of Puerto Ricans in the country. Danielle Alvarez, a Trump campaign senior adviser, said in a statement that Hinchcliffe’s “joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

Trump’s campaign did not disavow other comments made by warm-up speakers at Sunday’s rally

At an earlier point in his speech, referring to migrants in general, Hinchcliffe said: “Believe it or not, people, I welcome migrants to the United States of America with open arms. And by open arms, I mean like this.” He waved his hands in a “stop” motion, then added that Latinos “love making babies” and made a crude sex joke about them.

 

Grant Cardone, a businessman, said Vice President Kamala Harris and “her pimp handlers will destroy our country,” a metaphor that casts the Democratic presidential nominee as a prostitute.

David Rem, a childhood friend of Trump, called Harris “the devil” and “the Antichrist.”

And former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mocked the attention paid to Harris’s racial identity: “She’s just so impressive as the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president,” Carlson said. (Harris’s father is from Jamaica, and her mother was from India.)

When Trump took the stage later, he touted his support from people of various religions and races. Polls have shown some softening of support for Democrats among voters of color. “The Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion,” Trump said.

[Vesper 30,231]

Kamala Harris played hardball with banks. It meant billions for homeowners.

This chapter of Harris’ time as attorney general, allies say, showed a resolve to make gutsy decisions and withstand pressure to fall in line.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/28/kamala-harris-played-hardball-with-banks-it-meant-billions-homeowners/

Kamala Harris, then the attorney general of California, discusses banking reform legislation intended to protect homeowners from foreclosure, on April 16, 2012, in Sacramento. In her campaign for president, Harris frequently cites her negotiations with big banks as evidence that she knows how to deliver results for the middle class. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

Kamala Harris had been California’s attorney general for about eight weeks when she gathered with her peers in front of a coffee station at the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, D.C. Attorneys general from across the country were closing in on a multibillion dollar mortgage settlement with major banks, whose risky lending practices leading up to the Great Recession spurred an unprecedented crisis that by early 2011 was still costing Americans their homes.

But Harris couldn’t believe her fellow attorneys general were ready to make a deal. The banks’ offer seemed paltry considering the damage people suffered, especially in California, which had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. It also would also give banks some immunity from future lawsuits.

Some of the negotiators were concerned Harris might bail and risk killing the settlement. She skipped an afternoon session with her fellow attorneys general and headed to the Justice Department to drill down on what investigators were finding and push the Obama administration to do more.

“I don’t know that anyone can answer our questions,” two of Harris’s top aides recalled her saying after those meetings in March 2011. “We’re going to have to answer our own questions.”Following

Unsatisfied with what she was hearing — from the administration, other attorneys general and the banking sector — Harris walked away from those initial multistate talks six months later. There were no guarantees that move would pay off. But by early 2012, she struck a historic $18 billion agreement for California, far more than what had been on the table before. Harris now describes the saga on the campaign trail as a key example of how she has delivered for middle-class families.

The deal was far from perfect: Thousands of Californians still lost their homes, in some cases opting for sales where they lost home equity but avoided foreclosure. Advocacy groups were frustrated by the lack of data showing whether relief went to poorer communities and people of color. The settlement didn’t satisfy widespread ire at the banking system, and in the years that followed, enforcement wasn’t always smooth. Harris also wasn’t the only attorney general struggling with how much to push for, and when to decide enough was enough.

When she ran for the U.S. Senate in 2016, Harris’s Democratic opponent Loretta Sanchez accused her of exaggerating her influence in the settlement talks and faulted Harris at a news conference for not bringing “one single prosecution against any major bank executive.”

The Trump campaign has also suggested Harris has overstated the amount of relief the deal yielded for California homeowners. In a statement, Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Harris “lied about her work on the mortgage settlement.”

“She failed Californians and has failed Americans, as evidenced by unaffordable inflation, a porous border and weakness on the world stage,” Leavitt said.

But in interviews, two dozen former aides, attorneys general, banking experts and Obama administration officials underscored that Harris’s role as a tough negotiator set her apart. Her allies look back on the episode as an example of her ability to make gutsy decisions — withstanding pressure from colleagues trying to get her to fall in line and going toe to toe with banking executives who said her demands were unfair. Supporters say she was fueled by the desire to bring what she saw as “justice” to Californians on the brink of losing their homes, including many who found her at public events to beg for help.

“She got more involved in wanting to understand the remedies, and what those looked like, than any of the other AGs,” said Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Obama and one of his administration’s chief negotiators. “She pushed us hard.”

Harris was emboldened to walk away from the initial deal, said her former political adviser Brian Brokaw, because she felt the facts were on her side — putting her in a position of strength.

“It was a gamble,” Brokaw said. “She doesn’t take unnecessary risks or uncalculated risks — and she is big on cost-benefit analysis and a risk assessment. For her, this was a very calculated legal and political risk.”

Building her case

Back in California after that initial March 2011 meeting with the attorneys general, Harris began assembling a mortgage fraud strike force that launched in April. She divided it into three teams to look at different dimensions of the crisis.

One would investigate the players who were drawing up mortgages their clients couldn’t afford. A second took a deeper look at loan servicers and other businesses preying on borrowers in distress, knowing that the federal government wouldn’t prosecute such cases because they weren’t big enough. Finally, another team looked into securitization: how mortgages were being sold to investors — taking loans, wrapping them together and selling them as securities.

The strike force grew to 100 people. Harris brought on data scientists to tally specific breakdowns of how many homeowners had entered “the funnel” — the point when they were more than 90 days delinquent; how many received notices that they were facing foreclosure; and how many foreclosures had been completed. She would press her staff for updates on those figures weekly, sometimes daily.

There were intense time pressures — both for people facing foreclosure and for top Obama administration officials, who wanted a deal cinched as they barreled toward his reelection campaign. Other attorneys general and the banks were also trying to wrap up talks. But Harris wanted time to gather enough data to bolster her position.

At some of her public appearances, she was swarmed by desperate Californians who showed up with weathered Post-it notes, bags of loan papers and brown accordion files asking for help. Her office began holding meetings in the most affected communities to gather information on the tactics banks were using with individual homeowners. She spent time in devastated areas like Stockton and Fresno to try to assess how much relief would reach those communities.

“Community organizations and advocates on the ground were critical to pushing her, and asking her to hold out” for a more generous settlement, said Paulina Gonzalez-Brito, now chief executive of the economic justice group Rise Economy. “And she listened.”

Brian Nelson, then Harris’s chief counsel, said his office received hundreds of letters and documents from homeowners struggling to negotiate with their banks. Nelson, who served as the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence until joining the campaign in July, said Harris directed staff to make the intake process more efficient so the team could respond faster. While the AG’s office wasn’t permitted to take on individual cases, it ramped up a constituent service team to connect Californians with certified counselors and community groups who could help.

Donovan was used to getting Saturday morning calls from Harris, along with questions from her team dissecting wonky details about how relief from a settlement might be disbursed. She quizzed colleagues like Eric Schneiderman, then the New York attorney general, on how many people were underwater in his state. When Schneiderman said he didn’t know the answer on one phone call, an aide recounted, Harris told him to call her back when he knew, then hung up.

In an interview, Schneiderman said he didn’t remember that specific call. But he said the gist sounded familiar.

“I have no doubt she asked that,” Schneiderman said. “Her point was, my people were hurting, I’ve got all of these people hurting. I need relief now.” (Schneiderman later resigned over multiple physical abuse claims).

Harris wasn’t the only one pressing for a more aggressive deal while trying to get results fast. Schneiderman had been raising objections for months and withdrew from the talks before Harris. Meanwhile, Harris drew support from a small group of ideologically aligned colleagues including Beau Biden of Delaware, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Lisa Madigan of Illinois and Martha Coakley of Massachusetts. Cortez Masto, now a U.S. senator, said the group used to joke with Beau Biden (who died in 2015) that he was part of their “sisterhood,” a term she said Harris coined. There was a sense that pushing for more for California could help other states get a more substantial payout, too.

“She could have walked away completely and done her own thing,” Cortez Masto said. “She had the resources in her office to prosecute those banks on her own. Nevada — I’m so small. Delaware — so small … She could have done it on her own.”

California Attorney General Kamala Harris meets with San Francisco homeowners facing foreclosure on Nov. 21, 2011. (HUM Images/HUM Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

As Harris tried to build her case, former colleagues said, she felt the big banks weren’t taking her seriously — hardening her stance. Meetings with staff and top negotiators were tense, according to those on both sides of the negotiations. Someone in the meeting suggested that settling for the smaller deal would help Harris politically.

“This is a law enforcement action,” she snapped back, according to an aide who was in the room and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Riding in a cab afterward, an aide told Harris she should consider taking the deal. Litigation would take years and might not succeed; at least a settlement would bring in something.

Harris pushed back, asking how many people were going to lose their homes. “There’s so many people hanging on by their fingernails right now. What are they supposed to do?,” Harris asked the aide. They both realized that many families were going to lose their homes no matter what kind of deal they struck, so they ought to push for as much as possible.

In September, she pulled out of the deal.

In a letter to two of the chief negotiators — Thomas Perrelli at the Justice Department and Tom Miller, the Iowa attorney general — Harris wrote that over 11 months of settlement talks, another 560,000 California homes had fallen into foreclosure. Eight of the nation’s 10 hardest-hit cities were in her state. More than 2 million homeowners were underwater on their mortgages.

“This is not the deal California homeowners have been waiting for,” she wrote.

Friends immediately called, concerned that she had gone too far and was creating political adversaries who could doom her future career. Other attorneys general warned that without a settlement, homeowners might get nothing. California Gov. Jerry Brown told Harris, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private talk: “I hope you know what you are doing.”

‘I gave it right back’

The financial system had imploded well before Harris was elected attorney general. Some banks failed; others were bailed out by the government or forced into mergers. Public anger zeroed in on the banks and their executives, especially since people were still losing their homes and jobs after the worst of the Great Recession.

Harris set up a war room in her office. Blurry-eyed data analysts pored over their computers for weeks building a county-by-county breakdown of how many homes were at risk of foreclosure and how many were potentially eligible for relief. During the 2012 NFC championship game between the San Francisco 49ers and New York Giants, Harris — a huge football fan — catered Mexican takeout from her favorite spot. She conferred with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder about the negotiations during halftime so as not to miss a minute of the game.

Of the many heated meetings, Harris’s memoir recounts one particularly testy call with Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, who still runs the bank.

Everyone close to the negotiations knew any deal would need Dimon on board; losing him would be devastating. But Harris was direct, writing that she was tired of feeling caged- in by attorneys and other middlemen. She asked her assistant to get Dimon on the phone, and within a minute, she heard him yelling on the other end that she was trying to steal from his shareholders. (JPMorgan Chase declined to comment.)

“I gave it right back,” Harris wrote. ‘“Your shareholders? Your shareholders? My shareholders are the homeowners of California.”

That was a turning point after so much confrontation. The two talked details; one aide said Harris raised concerns about lenders creating mortgages people couldn’t afford, and pointed out that those loans were also being sold to investors.

Within weeks, a final deal for California was on the table: three of the largest mortgage companies — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were obligated to pay up to $18 billion in mortgage assistance. The deal also had a narrower focus than the broader settlement: Only help that cut what homeowners owed on their loans could be counted by the three banks. The banks were also incentivized to get money out in the hardest-hit counties, and within the first year.

Now it was a matter of finishing the job. Donovan, the HUD secretary, recalled riding with Obama in the presidential limousine when he asked the president to call Harris for a final commitment that would seal the deal. In the heat of Obama’s reelection campaign, administration officials were frustrated by how long the talks with the banks had dragged on. Obama had been tracking the negotiations closely and had a close friendship with Harris, but her push to get more money for California had often clashed with the administration’s tactics and desire to close an agreement.

There was also lingering tension since Harris had secured her own monitor, separate from the national watchdog, which no other state had. Plus, she locked in promises to spend a specific portion of the settlement in California. The concern was that dozens of other attorneys general might demand the same, jeopardizing the process all over again.

“If every state AG asked for the same thing, the settlement couldn’t work,” said Donovan, now chief executive and president of the national housing nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners. “It would have been enormously complex, and ultimately unworkable.”

But Harris insisted on an independent monitor for California to track aid as it went out — an idea the banks adamantly opposed.

She called Elizabeth Warren, who was building the nascent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Warren floated names by Katie Porter, then a law professor at University of California at Irvine, now a Democratic member of Congress. Porter immediately realized she might want to take on the work herself, she told The Post.

Harris and Porter first spoke before the final settlement to discuss the contours of the role — and Harris made it clear that she wanted a “watchdog” who would ensure the banks fulfilled their commitments.

Members of Occupy Sacramento march through downtown Sacramento during a Dec. 6, 2011, protest against home foreclosures. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

The banks had rejected the idea of an independent monitor for California, Porter said. But after striking the deal, Harris put out an announcement naming Porter to the job without giving them a heads-up, Porter recalled.

Working with the banks to ensure compliance, Porter made some unusual demands. When Bank of America told her that people were not responding to letters telling them they were eligible for relief, Porter insisted they rewrite the letters in a more understandable way on higher-quality paper, and make them double-sided in English and Spanish. She also asked the banks to put the seal of the independent monitor’s office on the envelope so people would realize its contents might help them and actually open it.

“The settlement wasn’t perfect,” Porter said. “But [Harris] made it so much better, both in how she negotiated it and that she saw the project all the way through.”

In the end, the banks delivered more than they promised, according to one of Porter’s reports from September 2013. Total relief ended up about $20 billion. Roughly half that amount went to first- and second-mortgage principal reduction for some 84,100 families. The other half went to short sales, where banks took losses on houses worth less than their mortgages. That meant plenty of people lost their houses, but it was still their best financial option.

More than a decade later, Harris still uses the settlement to introduce herself to many voters unfamiliar with her record. During her speech at the Democratic National Convention in late August, Harris cited her work for homeowners as an example of how she spent her career as a prosecutor fighting for the American people.

“As attorney general of California, I took on the big banks, delivered $20 billion for middle-class families who faced foreclosure and helped pass a homeowner bill of rights, one of the first of its kind in the nation,” she said.

[Vesper 30,231]

American democracy at a crossroads: Could history repeat Itself?

As the US faces a pivotal election, parallels with history raise stark questions about the resilience of democratic institutions and the global impact of America’s choices.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/american-democracy-at-a-crossroads-could-history-repeat-itself

 

No one knows how the US presidential election will turn out. One possibility is that the Trump bubble will finally burst, allowing for a return to normalcy in America and around the world. But it is also possible that the United States will lurch toward a radical militarised authoritarianism that would establish a new norm for despots elsewhere. 

Political scientists are hardly the only ones to see worrisome historical resonances here. According to Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, General John Kelly, the former president “fits the definition of fascist,” by which he means “a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralised autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy.” 

Modern US-style fascism has obvious roots in the past. In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth was drawing on real historical figures and events to present his counterfactual scenario in which Charles Lindbergh is elected president on a radical isolationist, anti-Semitic “America First” program. And some analysts and historians would look back even further, not just to the 1930s, but a century earlier, to the populist rhetoric and promiscuous racism of President Andrew Jackson. 

In any case, episodes of democratic collapse always give rise to the same anguished question. Has some particular feature of the culture gradually eroded the political system, or are we dealing with a deeper, innate human tendency that can only ever be held in check by the right institutional arrangements (like those brilliantly outlined by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison in the Federalist Papers)?

The iconic case of a descent into barbarism is, of course, interwar Germany. To explain the country’s slide into political violence, fascism, militarism, and ultimately genocide, some analysts have pointed to inherent German cultural proclivities – from Martin Luther’s fierce anti-Semitism to nineteenth-century German liberals’ abdication in the face of raw political power and Bismarck’s “blood and iron.” 

Like this year’s US contest, the German elections of the 1930s were very close. In each case, Adolf Hitler and his party won a significantly smaller share of the vote than Trump is likely to receive in November. After winning a 37% share in the July 1932 election, the Nazi Party slid to 33% in the November 1932 contest. Even in the unfree election of March 1933 – when the Communist Party was banned and voters were subjected to mass intimidation – the Nazi vote was under 44%. Hitler himself won only 30% of the vote in the first round of the spring 1932 presidential election, and 37% in the second round. 

Thus, Hitler was not swept into power by a vast wave of support. Rather, he owed his political ascent to the response from traditional institutions: the army, the bureaucracy, the police force, and above all the business community. 

Like corporate America today, German captains of industry were divided. Many were suspicious of the Nazis, but even they didn’t fully recognise the radicalism of Hitler’s agenda. Georg Solmssen, the CEO of Germany’s largest bank (Deutsche Bank), had been baptised as a Protestant, but his grandfather had been a rabbi, and his father had been a banker who went into finance because Jews were excluded from the civil service. This calm, intelligent man saw the Nazis as a threat largely because of the socialist and populist elements of their program; their rabid anti-Semitism, he assumed, was just a tactical electoral ploy. 

Solmssen did not comprehend what Nazism was about until April 1933, when it was too late. He was hardly alone. Many decent people lacked the imagination to grasp the extent of the violence that Hitler would soon unleash. The assumption within the German establishment was that the demagogue could be tamed. But this dangerous view was based on an illusion. 

After all, the broader political context had fundamentally changed. The post-World War I reparations system, established at the 1919 Versailles peace conference, had severely constrained Germany and limited its room for maneuver; but by 1933, the international system had already disintegrated. Two years earlier, the Japanese army had provoked a border incident in Manchuria and then flooded across the frontier, ignoring the League of Nations and its covenant forbidding “aggression.” 

Moreover, with the global economy suffering through the Great Depression, there were few incentives to keep playing by the rules of the old economic system. Nationalism and autarky thus became increasingly attractive as costless strategies to pump up German living standards. 

Again, there are ominous parallels with the current moment. Most, if not all, international institutions are showing signs of their age, and the United Nations system has been paralysed by divisions over Russia’s war on Ukraine and Israel’s campaigns against Hamas, Hezbollah, and – perhaps soon – Iran. 

Unlike in the early 1930s, however, the world economy is still very much interconnected and interdependent. Thus, any move toward genuine autarky would not be painless. On the contrary, the costs would be glaringly obvious to Americans and the rest of the world, and to financial markets above all. 

In this context, it is stunning to hear prominent financial figures like BlackRock’s Larry Fink argue that the US election “really doesn’t matter” for markets. Why won’t leading figures like Warren Buffett come out and say something? They seem to be reproducing the behaviour of German business leaders before January 1933. 

Precisely because international economic connections can restrain national political action, severing them risks causing a major financial shock. Depending on how this election plays out, there could soon come a time when Americans (and everyone else) will be very grateful for the constraints that come with a globalised economy. Few events are more sobering – and more discrediting to those pushing bad policy – than a financial meltdown that destroys voters’ livelihoods and degrades their living standards.

[Vesper 30,231]

Outsourcing our future to for-profit AI

The recent AI Nobel Prize win and California’s vetoed AI safety bill highlight the growing trend of placing our future in the hands of private corporations, with little public accountability.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/outsourcing-our-future-to-for-profit-ai

 

Within the past month, California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed an artificial-intelligence safety bill, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to David Baker, a professor at the University of Washington, and to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper, employees of Google’s subsidiary DeepMind and its spin-off Isomorphic Labs. These two events may seem to have little in common, but, taken together, they suggest that outsourcing humanity’s future to profit-maximizing private corporations is something to be celebrated. 

While the California bill was not flawless, it did represent the first substantial effort to hold developers accountable for the potential harms that their AI models might cause. Moreover, it focused not just on any risk but on “critical harm,” like developing weapons of mass destruction or causing at least $500 million worth of damage. 

The tech industry, Google among them, lobbied fiercely against the bill, making a very old argument. As the Financial Times editorial board put it, new regulations could “stunt … the emergence of an innovation that could help diagnose diseases, accelerate scientific research, and boost productivity.” Once again, such opportunity costs are deemed more harmful than whatever damage AI might do to people’s ability to control their own destinies, or even to live peacefully in their societies. 

The 2024 Nobel marks the first time that the prize has been awarded in a natural science to employees of a multinational corporation. All previous awardees were or had been university professors or researchers at government-funded research institutes, all of whom had published their results in peer-reviewed journals and made their findings available to the world. Whether the Swedish Academy intended it or not, its decision to include the Google researchers helps to legitimize the privatization of science, which is no longer part of humanity’s commons. Like so many resources before it, the science of AI is enclosed within a walled garden accessible only to those who can pay the entrance fee. 

True, the AI model AlphaFold2, which earned Hassabis and Jumper the prize, together with its source code, has been made publicly available. According to the AlphaFold.com, “Google DeepMind and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have partnered to create AlphaFold DB to make these predictions freely available to the scientific community.” On the other hand, DeepMind holds multiple patents to AlphaFold. According to the logic of property rights, the company, not the public, will always have the final say over the technology’s use. AlphaFold’s website is a “.com,” denoting something fundamentally different from, say, the Human Genome Project, with its “.gov” URL. 

In the world of information technology, “free” is never free. Payments are tendered in data, not in dollars. The data that enable AlphaFold to predict the three-dimensional structure of a protein come from the public domain. DeepMind’s partner in developing AlphaFold is an intergovernmental research organization funded by more than 20 member states of the European Union. According to Jumper, “public data were essential to the development of AlphaFold.” Without data that was compiled and organized by scientists who received taxpayer money for it, there would be no AlphaFold. 

Notwithstanding the prescience of public officials in creating this huge database, governments are regularly disparaged for lacking the knowledge, skills, resources, and foresight to promote innovations and advance scientific and economic progress. We are constantly told that only the private sector, with its compelling monetary incentives, can do what it takes to propel the world forward. 

In reality, the private sector regularly gets a free ride on work produced by scientists who were supported by public money or employed by public research institutes. The first satellite was launched by the US government, not Elon Musk; the US military developed the internet before it was commercialized; and pharmaceutical companies rarely invest in basic research. Why bother when you can just wait for scientists funded by the US National Institutes of Health or similar agencies to advance a field to the point where profitable investments can be made? 

Such is the logic of profit-seeking corporations. Their purpose is financial returns, not human progress. Once in the game, they seek to monopolize scientific knowledge by securing patents or hiding their findings behind the barriers provided by trade-secrecy law. Without the helping hand of the state, they would have neither basic science nor legal protections for the monopolies that furnish them with large returns – which they then hold up as proof of their superiority to government. 

It is not hard to understand why private companies enjoy this game. The mystery is why governments willingly play into industry’s hands, handing over years of publicly funded research without guaranteeing that the public has its say in determining how it is used. The California legislation would have mandated that AI models include a capacity for full shutdown in case things go wrong, but that provision was killed off with the rest of the bill. 

There is nothing new to the argument that if we do not know enough about future damages, we should refrain from interfering in “private” markets, which always perform best without government “interference.” Oil and gas companies relied on it when denying the risk of climate change and their contribution to it, even as their own research told them otherwise. Yet here we are again. Apparently, we should place our future in the hands of private corporations whose sole purpose is maximising shareholder value. What could possibly go wrong?

[cosmicway 1,333]

The Trumpees hate Mexicans more than anything else.
90% of Trump ideology is anti-mexican.
Strange thing, "our" Nigel, Lepen, Orban don't even talk about Mexicans.
Vaguely I remember some stories about Chilean pickpockets in Athens in the seventies, but nothing more.
The Americans have a history though.
Cuba became communist and remains communist for 35 years now after communism in Russia has been expunged.
Why ?
Because the yanks don't want it to become a state.
They say "never - Cuba is only for cigars".
This bizarre mentality culminated in Trumpism.
You d' expect yanks to want Cuba to become American, very much like the Argentinians are after the Malvinas (Falklands) that are neigbouring their shores.
What if Putin decides to send some nukes over there to Habana ?
It does n't even make sense.

Edited October 28, 2024 by cosmicway