Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 30,085]

Bernie Sanders Is Right: Democrats Have Abandoned the Working Class

The party chased former Republicans and rich donors, while alienating the working-class majority.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/bernie-sanders-democrats-working-class/

 

Senator Bernie Sanders speaks during a primary night rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Tuesday, February 11, 2020.(Adam Glanzman / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has quickly emerged as the most important and polarizing voice in the struggle over the future of the Democratic Party. In response to Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential contest, Sanders on Wednesday penned a scathing analysis in which he noted,

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them…. Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy, which has so much economic power?

Answering his own questions, Sanders declared, “Probably not.”

Sanders’s analysis was shared by many, not only labor leaders such as Painters Union president Jimmy Williams Jr. but also unexpected sources such as Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who started his political career as a moderate Democrat. In an X thread on Sunday, Murphy acknowledged that the radical critique of mainstream Democrats was accurate, writing that “when progressives like Bernie aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists. Why? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base.”

In contrast to Murphy, other party leaders and pundits remained in deep denial. Responding to Sanders’s comment, Representative James Clyburn, whose endorsement of Joe Biden was crucial for his becoming the party’s presidential nominee in 2020, said, “I do not agree that we are not a party of working men and women…We ought to just chill out for a while…don’t worry about blaming anybody.” Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi was even more curt, saying, “I don’t respect saying that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class.”

Sanders responded to Pelosi by noting,

“We have not even brought forth legislation to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, despite the fact that some 20 million people in this country are working for less than $15 an hour in America today…if you’re an average working person out there, do you really think that the [D]emocratic party is going to the mats, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no.”

One frequent objection to Sanders was that Biden had actually done a great deal for the working class—and also that Bidenomics was a success. This was the tack taken by Will Stancil, a Minnesota attorney who recently failed in his congressional primary campaign but who nonetheless enjoys a large liberal audience on social media. Stancil has been adamant throughout the Biden presidency that any claim that workers are suffering economic distress is merely a creation of biased media coverage. Stancil tweeted, “There’s no actual empirical evidence that workers suffered greatly in the last few years, and a ton of evidence workers prospered.”

Empirically, the vast majority of voters don’t share Stancil’s opinion. On the eve of the election, according to CBS News, 60 percent of Americans rated the economy as “fairly bad” or “very bad.” To dismiss all these voters as victims of brainwashing might be emotionally satisfying—but it is bad politics. In contrast to the empathetic Bill Clinton of the 1990s, Stancil and his ilk are saying, “I don’t feel your pain.”

A more extended version of the Stancil argument was made by Michael A. Cohen—a centrist journalist who frequently and insistently reminds people that he is not Donald Trump’s former lawyer. Writing on MSNBC, Cohen argued that Sanders was flatly wrong. Biden, Cohen contended, has been “staunchly pro-labor”; he also claimed that that Kamala Harris made a concerted effort to foreground economic populism in her political campaign. According to Cohen, “the Harris campaign poured $200 million into ads that focused on her economic message. In fact, she outspent the Trump campaign by around $70 million on ads about the economy.”

Strangely, Cohen ended his article by claiming that, although the Democrats haven’t abandoned the working class, maybe they should do so now. If there is any path for Democrats to return to national power, Cohen suggests, it might lie in “doubling down on what produced such significant political gains for the party in 2018, 2020 and 2022—college-educated suburban voters.” Conversely, Cohen insists that working-class voters are too socially conservative to ever vote for the Democrats, concluding that “if Democrats think they can win back the loyalty of the working class, they likely should think again.”

Cohen apparently agrees with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who in 2016 infamously declared: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

Normally, the electorate selects political leaders—but it is also the case that political parties sometimes select their electorate. Democrats like Schumer and Cohen have been eager to make the Democrats into the party of well-to-do, college-educated former Republicans, even at the expense of alienating the working class. Suburban college-educated voters are wealthier, so more able to fill the party’s coffers—and they are less likely to demand economic policies that might alienate even wealthier donors.

What of the claim that Biden was strongly pro-worker, and that Harris did run on economic populism? There’s an element of truth to both, but the reality is that is that both Biden and Harris were compromised figures.

In a clarifying analysis, Stephen Semler, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, documented that Biden’s focus on economic populism waned in the spring of 2022. According to Semler, “Once Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden ditched his progressive domestic agenda and rebranded as a deficit hawk.” Even as a rhetorical focus, economic populism became less important to Biden than his attempt to revive Cold War liberalism, with the United States pitted against autocratic foes on the international stage and an authoritarian menace at home. As a hawk, Biden started talking much more about the threats to democracy—and much less about how he could improve the lives of ordinary Americans. Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein reports, “Ron Klain, former chief of staff, wanted President Biden to acknowledge the pain the Fed’s high interest rates were causing families and businesses through higher costs. The push was met with resistance from a White House wary of even the appearance of criticizing the Fed.”

Harris was even more tone-deaf on economic pain than Biden. On Saturday, The New York Times reported that the Harris campaign watered down its economic message and policies in order to please wealthy donors—an effort headed by Harris’s brother-in-law, Tony West, an Uber executive. According to the newspaper:

The result was a Democratic candidate who vacillated between competing visions for how to address the economic problems that voters repeatedly ranked as their top issue. Ms. Harris neither abandoned nor fully embraced key liberal goals for confronting corporate power and raising taxes on the rich. Instead, she adopted marginal pro-business tweaks to the status quo that both her corporate and progressive allies agreed never coalesced into a clear economic argument.

Bernie Sanders was right: The Democrats have betrayed the working class. This is not just a matter of one election but goes back to the triumph of neoliberalism within the party’s elite, which started with Jimmy Carter’s winning the presidential nomination in 1976. This process has never been unchallenged: Resistance to the neoliberal turn came from many insurgent campaigns—notably those of Jesse Jackson and Bernie Sanders himself.

The only way out of the neoliberal trap remains the path Sanders laid out in his two primary runs in 2016 and 2020: a small-donor-funded campaign that rejects corporate control and is stridently pro–working class. Sanders is, alas, too old to run again. But the real question for the Democrats is who can emerge as the next Bernie Sanders—and win the 2028 nomination.

[Fulham Broadway 17,299]

8 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Bernie Sanders Is Right: Democrats Have Abandoned the Working Class

The party chased former Republicans and rich donors, while alienating the working-class majority.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/bernie-sanders-democrats-working-class/

 

Senator Bernie Sanders speaks during a primary night rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Tuesday, February 11, 2020.(Adam Glanzman / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has quickly emerged as the most important and polarizing voice in the struggle over the future of the Democratic Party. In response to Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential contest, Sanders on Wednesday penned a scathing analysis in which he noted,

It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them…. Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy, which has so much economic power?

Answering his own questions, Sanders declared, “Probably not.”

Sanders’s analysis was shared by many, not only labor leaders such as Painters Union president Jimmy Williams Jr. but also unexpected sources such as Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who started his political career as a moderate Democrat. In an X thread on Sunday, Murphy acknowledged that the radical critique of mainstream Democrats was accurate, writing that “when progressives like Bernie aggressively go after the elites that hold people down, they are shunned as dangerous populists. Why? Maybe because true economic populism is bad for our high-income base.”

In contrast to Murphy, other party leaders and pundits remained in deep denial. Responding to Sanders’s comment, Representative James Clyburn, whose endorsement of Joe Biden was crucial for his becoming the party’s presidential nominee in 2020, said, “I do not agree that we are not a party of working men and women…We ought to just chill out for a while…don’t worry about blaming anybody.” Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi was even more curt, saying, “I don’t respect saying that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class.”

Sanders responded to Pelosi by noting,

“We have not even brought forth legislation to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, despite the fact that some 20 million people in this country are working for less than $15 an hour in America today…if you’re an average working person out there, do you really think that the [D]emocratic party is going to the mats, taking on powerful special interests and fighting for you? I think the overwhelming answer is no.”

One frequent objection to Sanders was that Biden had actually done a great deal for the working class—and also that Bidenomics was a success. This was the tack taken by Will Stancil, a Minnesota attorney who recently failed in his congressional primary campaign but who nonetheless enjoys a large liberal audience on social media. Stancil has been adamant throughout the Biden presidency that any claim that workers are suffering economic distress is merely a creation of biased media coverage. Stancil tweeted, “There’s no actual empirical evidence that workers suffered greatly in the last few years, and a ton of evidence workers prospered.”

Empirically, the vast majority of voters don’t share Stancil’s opinion. On the eve of the election, according to CBS News, 60 percent of Americans rated the economy as “fairly bad” or “very bad.” To dismiss all these voters as victims of brainwashing might be emotionally satisfying—but it is bad politics. In contrast to the empathetic Bill Clinton of the 1990s, Stancil and his ilk are saying, “I don’t feel your pain.”

A more extended version of the Stancil argument was made by Michael A. Cohen—a centrist journalist who frequently and insistently reminds people that he is not Donald Trump’s former lawyer. Writing on MSNBC, Cohen argued that Sanders was flatly wrong. Biden, Cohen contended, has been “staunchly pro-labor”; he also claimed that that Kamala Harris made a concerted effort to foreground economic populism in her political campaign. According to Cohen, “the Harris campaign poured $200 million into ads that focused on her economic message. In fact, she outspent the Trump campaign by around $70 million on ads about the economy.”

Strangely, Cohen ended his article by claiming that, although the Democrats haven’t abandoned the working class, maybe they should do so now. If there is any path for Democrats to return to national power, Cohen suggests, it might lie in “doubling down on what produced such significant political gains for the party in 2018, 2020 and 2022—college-educated suburban voters.” Conversely, Cohen insists that working-class voters are too socially conservative to ever vote for the Democrats, concluding that “if Democrats think they can win back the loyalty of the working class, they likely should think again.”

Cohen apparently agrees with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who in 2016 infamously declared: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

Normally, the electorate selects political leaders—but it is also the case that political parties sometimes select their electorate. Democrats like Schumer and Cohen have been eager to make the Democrats into the party of well-to-do, college-educated former Republicans, even at the expense of alienating the working class. Suburban college-educated voters are wealthier, so more able to fill the party’s coffers—and they are less likely to demand economic policies that might alienate even wealthier donors.

What of the claim that Biden was strongly pro-worker, and that Harris did run on economic populism? There’s an element of truth to both, but the reality is that is that both Biden and Harris were compromised figures.

In a clarifying analysis, Stephen Semler, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, documented that Biden’s focus on economic populism waned in the spring of 2022. According to Semler, “Once Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden ditched his progressive domestic agenda and rebranded as a deficit hawk.” Even as a rhetorical focus, economic populism became less important to Biden than his attempt to revive Cold War liberalism, with the United States pitted against autocratic foes on the international stage and an authoritarian menace at home. As a hawk, Biden started talking much more about the threats to democracy—and much less about how he could improve the lives of ordinary Americans. Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein reports, “Ron Klain, former chief of staff, wanted President Biden to acknowledge the pain the Fed’s high interest rates were causing families and businesses through higher costs. The push was met with resistance from a White House wary of even the appearance of criticizing the Fed.”

Harris was even more tone-deaf on economic pain than Biden. On Saturday, The New York Times reported that the Harris campaign watered down its economic message and policies in order to please wealthy donors—an effort headed by Harris’s brother-in-law, Tony West, an Uber executive. According to the newspaper:

The result was a Democratic candidate who vacillated between competing visions for how to address the economic problems that voters repeatedly ranked as their top issue. Ms. Harris neither abandoned nor fully embraced key liberal goals for confronting corporate power and raising taxes on the rich. Instead, she adopted marginal pro-business tweaks to the status quo that both her corporate and progressive allies agreed never coalesced into a clear economic argument.

Bernie Sanders was right: The Democrats have betrayed the working class. This is not just a matter of one election but goes back to the triumph of neoliberalism within the party’s elite, which started with Jimmy Carter’s winning the presidential nomination in 1976. This process has never been unchallenged: Resistance to the neoliberal turn came from many insurgent campaigns—notably those of Jesse Jackson and Bernie Sanders himself.

The only way out of the neoliberal trap remains the path Sanders laid out in his two primary runs in 2016 and 2020: a small-donor-funded campaign that rejects corporate control and is stridently pro–working class. Sanders is, alas, too old to run again. But the real question for the Democrats is who can emerge as the next Bernie Sanders—and win the 2028 nomination.

He's right, not that he would have represented them much better. Trump tapped into that vacuum, talked their language and gave them immigrants, woke and people of colour to blame when seeking scapegoats is the Pavlov dog reaction to uncertainty.

[Vesper 30,085]

 

The Future of Public Health—or Lack Thereof—Under Trump

Any significant influence of RFK Jr. in Trump’s orbit would represent a recklessness never before seen in America’s public health history.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/future-of-public-health-under-trump/

Republican presidential nominee former president Donald Trump welcomes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the stage at a Turning Point Action campaign rally at the Gas South Arena. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

 

Most of what “public health” does for Americans is taken for granted. Before the Covid pandemic, most people probably didn’t think about it at all.

 

Yet the fact that, in most places in the United States, we can count on the water we drink to be safe, that the food we buy is not contaminated with e-coli or listeria, and that we don’t have to deal with dreaded childhood diseases that ripped through our communities only a few decades ago, is a testament to the tireless work of many, unheralded, often unknown heroes.

 

This invisible safety net has been built up over the years, always underfunded and understaffed, always not-enough, but it’s all we’ve got.

 

And now comes the wrecking ball. If Trump’s first term was a disaster for public health—and his response to Covid, from blocking agencies from rolling out testing and recommending masking early on to embracing the idea that we should let people get infected with the virus is the prime case in point here—at least there were institutionalists at key posts: Scott Gottlieb at FDA, Alex Azar at HHS, even the odious Robert Redfield at CDC, and Francis Collins hanging on at NIH.

 

Each of these men at least had experience in federal agencies or relevant health experience of some kind.

 

The avatar of Trump 2.0’s public health policy will altogether be something else.

 

Whether or not Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is given a cabinet post, an agency to run, a desk in the West Wing or the Old Executive Office Building or even just remains as an unofficial adviser to the president-elect, he represents a know-nothing, conspiracy-addled future destined to make us sick.

 

Any significant influence of RFK Jr. in Trump’s orbit represents a recklessness that we have never seen in public health in any federal administration in this country’s history.

 

By now, we’ve heard Kennedy’s views on everything from fluoride in drinking water to childhood vaccines, to threats to recreate the NIH and FDA in the image of his own quackery. Let’s be clear: Kennedy’s views are not “alternative” to orthodoxy, meant to shake up the system—they are verifiably false. They are nonsense.

 

Let’s take his claims on fluoride as an example. RFK Jr. wrote on X in early November: “Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.”

 

Um—no. In high doses over prolonged periods of time—as with many other substances (even water and oxygen!)—exposure to fluoride can be a problem, but not in the small concentrations we see in drinking water.

 

Lest we forget: Fluoride has been a bugaboo of the far right since the 1950s, when fluoridation was supposed to be part of a communist plot to take over America.

 

And since conspiracy theories know no borders, we can also look at a natural experiment up in Calgary, Canada, for further evidence. In 2011, Calgary’s’s city council banned fluoridation, and now is set to reintroduce it next year.

 

Why? Because since fluoridation ended, cavities in children’s teeth have become more numerous and larger, often requiring treatment under general anesthesia and/or intravenous antibiotic therapy to fight infections associated with tooth decay.

 

As one researcher at the University of Calgary has said, the decision to ban fluoridation had a clear result: It was a source of “avoidable and potentially life-threatening disease, pain, suffering, misery and expense…especially [for] very young children and their families.”

 

As for vaccination, Kennedy’s views are long-standing and well-known. He has suggested that “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective,” and he still clings to the long-debunked idea that vaccines cause autism. More recently, during the Covid pandemic, he created a multimillion-dollar anti-vaccine juggernaut to dissuade people from getting vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2.

 

There is no person right now more vital to the anti-vaccine movement than RFK Jr., and his impact has been deadly.

 

By convincing people to forgo routine pediatric vaccinations, he has endangered the lives of thousands of kids, stoked fear in families with autistic children, and in at least once instance was partially responsible for a devastating outbreak of measles.

 

In 2019, 83 people, mostly children, died of the preventable disease in Samoa. While Kennedy has denied that his words and actions were responsible for the outbreak, he has supported anti-vaccination efforts on the islands, written to the nation’s prime minister about the dangers of vaccines, and visited Samoa to meet with anti-vaxxers and subsequently praised them for their work.

 

As Derek Lowe, a columnist from the United States’ leading scientific journal, Science, has said: “Kennedy’s views on science and medicine are not only wrong, they are actively harmful and destructive. He has used them to make a great deal of money, and he has lied about them to interviewers and reporters whenever he finds it convenient.”

 

Legal experts have suggested that Trump and Kennedy may not have the authority to do many of the things that Kennedy has proposed and that public health in the US is largely a matter of state and local control outside of the federal remit. But Trump and Kennedy can do a lot of damage without changing a single law, through appointments, executive action, rule-making and the like. 

 

Schedule F is an executive order that would allow Trump to shift the status of civil servants to political appointees by fiat, fire them, and then replace them with incompetent apparatchiks. How would this work?

 

Well, if the new president wanted to fire the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a post Anthony Fauci previously held, the position’s status as a civil service job would make this difficult to do.

 

But with the bureaucratic magic of Schedule F, the directorship could be reclassified as a political appointment, the director fired, and the role filled by a loyalist without any qualifications.

 

Now think of the effect of reclassifications, removals, and new hires up and down the public health civil service: It’s a recipe for chaos and destruction, where friends of Trump and Kennedy could be put in place in agency after agency, disposing of decades of experience and expertise in an instant.

 

In addition to these dangers, with the bully pulpit of the White House, Trump and Kennedy could also, for instance, discourage fluoridation and vaccination and push GOP governors to take up the worst of their terrible ideas.

 

Ron DeSantis would be happy to oblige and already has a head start in dismantling public health in his state. This doesn’t require any federal action, besides the willingness to sow misinformation and lies.

 

RFK Jr. is the poster boy for the new Trump administration, a rich man who never has had to worry about a thing in his life, putting the lives of ordinary Americans in jeopardy because he thinks he knows better than scientists.

 

In fact, the man who thought it was a good idea to stage a hit-and-run with a dead baby bear and a bicycle in Central Park has shown a lack of judgment across the board for a long while.

 

But he is part of an emerging kakistocracy-in-waiting that will be run by plutocrats and zealots.

 

Our public health system in America is fragile and shouldn’t be a plaything. Once he’s done with his games, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men may not be able to put our public health infrastructure back together again. The damage may be lasting and profound.

 

But we are not powerless.

 

So much of public health happens locally—and we can protect this precious national resource by speaking up and speaking out, at our city or town council meetings, calling and writing our state representatives, our mayors and our governors.

 

This is going to be necessary work. As my Yale colleague Timothy Snyder has said: “Defend institutions.… Institutions do not protect themselves.

 

So choose an institution you care about and take its side.” This may be your local public health department or Planned Parenthood clinic, a mental health clinic or needle exchange program, or services for LGBTQ+ or immigrant populations in your neighborhood.

 

These are all part of what makes public health happen day in and day out in our communities. Deprive RFK Jr. and Donald Trump of their power; take it away from them with focus and tenacity.

 

Chip away at their campaign to destroy public health in America. These kinds of small acts will add up and will make a difference. If these men are the disease, let us be the cure.

Edited November 16, 2024 by Vesper

[cosmicway 1,333]

WILL TRUMPISM BE SUCCEEDED BY MORE TRUMPISM OR BY COMMUNISM ?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The political centre stands for democracy, peace and progress, ideologically though not necessarily behaviourally by the various centrist political leaders.
The political centre believes in freedom, liberal economy, private enterprise, workers rights, the welfare state and in race equality.
It is however about to become extinct.
In America and in the western European nations it appears the next step is towards the right:
Limited freedom, no welfare state, blind nationalism (chauvinism) and racism. Limiting workers rights appears to be lower in the agenda of the present generation of right wingers, whereas it used to be topmost.
At the same time communists-fellow travelers are squeezing the centrists into a tight corner.
So the 50% centrist majorities or near majorities of the past have become 15%.
Under Trumpism the leftists will suffer, they may even start visiting desert islands once again, like Guantanamo.
But since the Trump system has its obvious flaws and drawbacks, they may eventually win the day.
This is the game they are playing. They believe Stalin will be back and Che also - in his role as executioner of the LBGTQists.
It may work either way in the long run.

 

Edited November 16, 2024 by cosmicway

[Vesper 30,085]

 

Welcome to the Department of Government Idiocy

Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency or “DOGE” will comprise of two clueless tech bros. What targets, exactly, will Musk and Ramaswamy try to hit?

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/welcome-to-the-department-of-government-idiocracy/

Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., joins former US president Donald Trump during a campaign event at the Butler Farm Show in Butler, Pennsylvania (Justin Merriman / Getty Images)

 

Give the incoming Trump administration this much credit: Faced with the potentially devastating burden of a maximally entitled tech bro inserting himself into government business, the president-elect has dispatched Elon Musk to a powerless bureaucratic backwater. What’s more, he’s paired Musk off with another, though differently entitled tech bro: biotech executive and once-failed GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

 

The nominal charge of the group the pair will captain—the Department of Government Efficiency—is to eliminate wasteful government spending. But as Trump’s announcement carefully stipulated, their collaboration—though “government” exists in its title—will occur “outside of government,” which loosely translates to “outside of earshot and the field of vision of White House personnel actually trying to get their jobs done.”

 

The eternally oblivious Musk, who as you might remember funneled more than $200 million in super PAC support to Trump’s campaign, exulted in the announcement of the new gig, promptly posting a piece of fan art with a mockup of a logo featuring the new group’s acronym, DOGE, to his website X.

 

Doge, you see, is the name of a crypto product in which Musk holds a major stake. Its logo, which also briefly replaced Twitter’s bird symbol on X, is a crude version of a dog mascot. (Following Trump’s announcement, Dogecoin instantly boomed in investment markets, replicating the same trend across the whole shady crypto sector, which anticipates a deregulatory bonanza after donating fully half of all corporate money to the 2024 campaign.)

 

In addition to extending Musk’s amazing run of never once being funny for a single moment in his life, the post on X also registered something more ominous: The main chieftain of the cost-cutting agency sports a massive array of economic conflicts of interest, having accrued a good deal of his centibillion-dollar fortune on a foundation of government contracts.

 

In addition, the Musk enterprises that are more strictly private-sector concerns, such as his electric car company, Tesla, and his now-flailing social media platform, X, often stand athwart the regulatory mandates of a host of federal agencies. However toothless DOGE may be on the White House organizational chart, it will still be positioned to intimidate administrators pursuing Musk’s self-interested agenda.

 

Still, the shared gig no doubt comes as a blow to the recently anointed MAGA fanboy, who’s been muscling into a host of preelection confabs with lawmakers and foreign leaders alongside Trump, as well as swanning around the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort as his self-advertised “first buddy.”

 

Yet a second Trump White House will be anything but a buddies’ playground. As any cursory acquaintance with the Trump family history will readily confirm, wannabe White House intimates who fasten themselves too closely to the former business mogul are often subject to swift exile. (See Don Jr.’s tour as a third-tier influencer on Rumble, and Eric’s career, well, doing whatever it is that Eric does.)

 

On top of that, Musk, a raging egomaniac incapable of sustaining many close relationships, is facing the additional humiliation of sharing authority over the new gig with Ramaswamy. A far more practiced Trump sycophant, he was briefly touted on lists for more substantial, grown-up appointments in the cabinet, but fell swiftly to earth as a make-believe spending wonk.

 

Ramaswamy’s comically inept presidential run culminated with his vow to be “unhinged” in his final debate. That promise could have doubled as the mission statement for his campaign, which trafficked mostly in warmed-over tirades on the menace of wokeness, alongside conspiracy-mongering over January 6, and the periodic call to invade Mexico and possibly Canada.

 

On one level, the Musk-Ramaswamy collaboration could almost double as an inspired plotline from Mike Judge’s HBO satire Silicon Valley. Take two of the most incorrigibly batshit, self-enamored figures in contemporary right-wing tech politics, and force them to work together.

 

Better yet, tee up the mandate for responsible government spending by matching up the vaporware magnate who upped the share price he paid for the white-elephant acquisition of Twitter so that it contained the talismanic pot-smokers’ number 4.20 with a biotech hustler who profiteers on drugs that rarely make it past the testing phase.

 

What could possibly go wrong?

 

Indeed, the very act of designating two chairs to direct an inquiry into the misapplication of government resources is the sort of self-canceling flourish that would be conveyed in, say, a musical conservatory called “the Kenny G Institute of Free-Jazz Improvisation.”

 

It’s already painfully clear that the swaggering Musk has little grasp of just what the job would actually entail.

 

During the campaign homestretch, when he wasn’t skipping around like a dipshit in a red hat behind Trump, Musk confidently pronounced that it wouldn’t be too great a lift to identify and eliminate “at least $2 trillion” in wasteful spending, when all discretionary spending in the 2024 fiscal year was $1.6 trillion, and overall spending clocked in at more than $6.75 trillion.

 

For Musk to hit his target, many critical outlays and income supports, such as Social Security and Medicare, would have to be eviscerated. That’s likely why, in a later X flourish, Musk endorsed a user’s view that rapid spending cuts, along with other proposals like power-boosted tariffs would trigger “a severe overreaction in the economy” ahead of a “tumble” in financial markets. “Sounds about right,” the dipshit replied.

 

Indifference to the social costs of his vanity projects is par for the course for Musk, as it is for his presidential benefactor. But since Trump is always capable of overruling his past commitments on a dime, and ghosting a whole slew of actual cabinet flunkeys—up to and including his former vice president—it’s hard to gauge when and whether Musk’s fiscal hobbyhorse could turn into a real and present threat to the well-being of millions of Americans.

 

There is, I suppose, some consolation in recalling the fate of the two high-profile special White House commissions that Trump unveiled in the early days of his first term.

 

In 2017, the White House launched the Victims of Immigrant Crime Engagement Office under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security, the highly publicized panel devoted to documenting and investigating runaway rates of immigrant violent crime.

 

The commission was an early indicator of the MAGA movement’s lurch into fascism, since it sought to depict an ethnic group as the source of a scourge of dangerous criminal behavior. It also rapidly proved to be a bust, since there was in fact no such immigrant crime epidemic.

 

Meanwhile, Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state, captained a Trump-sanctioned inquiry into the parallel moral panic over voting fraud, and came up empty as well.

 

Then again, fearmongering over immigration and rampant election denial remain the two principal calling cards of the current MAGA movement, even after Trump’s first administration face-planted in its efforts to document both.

 

Even if Musk and Ramaswamy dither away at DOGE meetings discussing the baleful proportions of the woke mind virus gnawing away at oligarchic impunity, swapping memes, or playing hacky sack like they do at Google HQ, there’s no small likelihood that they could give birth to another nihilistic MAGA crusade.

 

After all, as we saw in the final episode of Silicon Valley, a meltdown of coding and greed can come perilously close to destroying the world.

[KEVINAA 129]

 

The Pentagon fails its seventh consecutive financial audit, unable to account for $824 billion of its budget.

[Vesper 30,085]

2 hours ago, KEVINAA said:

 

The Pentagon fails its seventh consecutive financial audit, unable to account for $824 billion of its budget.

the replies to another X thread from the same X poster are disgusting

 

[robsblubot 3,595]

On 15/11/2024 at 15:59, cosmicway said:

After J6 we expected Trump was over and done with.
Later he announced his intention to carry on, so we thought he was going for a Ross Perot like third party, no rep after trying to lynch his own vice president and all that.
Later again we expected he could not win the nomination for the republican ticket.
All these expectations proved wrong and by late 2022-23 he was really back.
So the Dems should have tried to adopt a rep agenda on domestic issues by as much as possible but they did the opposite.

That was an easy "fix" and the republicans, some of which hate Trump, dropped the ball.

Trump should've been forbidden from running again early on.

I'm not a big fan of big pharma in the USA, so a little disruption wouldn't be so bad. 

[Vesper 30,085]

let this sink in (and remember it was TRUMP who forced the timetable for withdrawl, giving the Taliban all the time in the world to prepare)

Many on the Trump team want to execute the officers if they are found guilty in the court-martial.

 

[Vesper 30,085]

https://globalextremism.org/post/new-forms-of-online-misogyny/

Warning: This analysis contains highly offensive and potentially triggering language and imagery. Where possible, slur words are marked with asterisks, but in cases where that may make the content unclear, offensive language is cited.

Violent misogyny is thriving in a new way on hate sites since Donald Trump’s election. Over the past week, commenters on the hate-filled 4chan forums have been calling for “Trump rape squads,” J.D Vance to conscript “incels into the first rape squads,” and invoking the dystopian book and television series The Handmaid’s Tale, which depicts a horribly misogynistic future in which women are dehumanized and threatened.

Following the election of Trump on November 5, worrying indications of growing hate and bigotry in online spaces became apparent. With male supremacy and “incel” (i.e., involuntary celibate, a misogynistic ideology which has inspired numerous mass casualty attacks) culture becoming mainstream, misogyny, which has long been a part of the fabric of society, frequently showing up in mainstream pop culture and politics, is quickly escalating into the glorification of violence against women and the celebration of the possibility of women’s rights being stripped away. 

New research by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) has uncovered numerous violent misogynistic trends which are gaining traction on fringe platforms like 4chan and spreading on platforms popular with far-right extremists, such as Twitter and Telegram, since Trump’s election. Misogynistic rhetoric ramped up on 4chanon 4chan from the end of September 2024 through November 5, Election Day, when instances reached a year-high of 1,278 posts, and remained high in the week after the election.

Misogyny is a mainstay on 4chan, an incredibly hateful forum that has a history of originating misogynistic trends, such as the “DignifAI” hate campaign, which digitally altered women’s bodies and appearances to fit a “traditional” (i.e., sexist) mindset. 4chan is filled with calls to repeal the 19th amendment, which gives women the right to vote, threats of rape, and other derogatory comments.

 

However, emboldened extreme misogynists spurred by Trump’s election have found new ways to spread hate and violence against women. Hateful and violent rhetoric existing on 4chan is particularly concerning, as the platform has a longstanding connection to racially-motivated and antisemitic mass shootings, such as the racist Buffalo murders in 2022.This growth is of grave concern given 4chan’s history with real-world violence including mass shootings motivated by bigotry and extremism and the celebration of far-right terrorists like the El Paso shooter. It is home to the worst of the worst when it comes to violent rhetoric and the inspiration of violence.  

One of the new misogynistic trends gaining momentum on 4chan was inspired by neo-Nazi online commentator online commentator Nick Fuentes, who once had dinner with Trump at the Mar-a-Lago resort, whose tweet directed at his 441,000 followers, “Your body, my choice. Forever” targeting women’s reproductive rights went viral with more than 90 million views. 4chan users were quick to spread their newfound hate slogan and escalate the rhetoric to encourage violence. 

Mentions of “your body, my choice” on the platform saw a staggering 5,150 percent increase from November 5, the day Fuentes tweeted the phrase, to November 9. Several posts attempted to justify physical assault and rape, such as “Your body my choice is making cu*ts wet, thats why they are seething so hard. They are upset that it makes them horny i.e ragegasm…,” and “So it’s cool if I rape you, right? What am I saying, of course it’s cool. Your body, my choice, after all.” One comment, referencing the fact that Fuentes maced a woman who approached his door, celebrated his aggressive actions by saying “Your body, my choice. Your face, my mace. Go be jewish somewhere else.” Others tied Trump’s victory to the phrase, saying “Hows it feel knowing Trump won and its your body, my choice? LOL.” Some put the onus on women for Trump winning, as they believed “Women shot themselves in the foot” by wanting abortion rights and simply told them to “cope harder r*tard” after gloating about Trump being “practically free to do whatever he wants to women’s abortion rights as man.”

Another heightened trend on 4chan is invoking scenes and imagery from the book and television series The Handmaid’s Tale to advocate for violence against women. Mentions of receiving “handmaids,” who in The Handmaid’s Tale are women forced to give birth via sexual assault, and fantasizing about being part of “rape squads,” spiked 126 percent between November 4 and November 6, 126 percent between November 4 and November 6, and are remaining consistently higher compared to before the election.

 

4chan users are fantasizing about “minority-killing handmaid’s tale rape squads,” which they believe “women fantasize about,” including “being taken and raped constantly.” These violent and twisted fantasies include wishing for “handmaid sex slave[s]” and wondering how to purchase them (“What is the going rate for a handmaid right now?”). Similarly to the “your body, my choice” trend, users invoked Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance as their providers of sex slaves, with users looking forward to “Vance [conscripting] us incels into the first rape squads to enforce Handmaid’s tale rule of law,” counting down to the “Trump Rape Squad” being deployed, and calling for “roasties” (i.e., incel terminology for sexually active women) to get “Handmaid’s Tale’d” (i.e., raped). 

Handmaid’s Tale memes and even merchandise based on the term “rape squad” are making the rounds on other platforms like Twitter and Telegram. A post by an account called “FACELESS” depicts t-shirts targeting the use of Intrauterine Devices (IUDs), a form of birth control, and advertises the violent hashtag #RAPESQUAD2025. Another user, “NotUnclePepeloni,” fantasized about being selected by Trump to be part of a “Project 2025 Rapenought.”

The Proud Boys of Columbus posted a misogynistic image on Telegram using The Handmaid’s Tale as reference. One image features Elizabeth Moss, who plays main character June Osborne in the television series, saying “sisters arise” followed by Trump responding with “and go make me a Sandwich!” “Go make me a sandwich” is a long-standing derogatory phrase used to portray women as subservient to men and only belonging in domestic spaces, like the kitchen. As previously reported, other Proud Boys chapters, such as Proud Boys Ohio and the Proud Boys of Columbus, posted memes referring to “rape squads” and The Handmaid’s Tale.

Following the election and Fuentes’ “your body, my choice” tweet, there has been discussion among some women in the United States about the Korean “4b” movement, which represents the Korean words bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae and bisekseu, which translate to no marriage, no childbirth, no dating and no sex with men.representing the Korean words bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae and bisekseu, which translate to no marriage, no childbirth, no dating and no sex with men. Misogynists across the internet, and 4chan in particular, took exception to their choice, and responded with derogatory comments and threats of rape. Mentions of the 4b movement, including calls for rape and derogatory language against women, rose 2,579 percent from November 4 to November 9.

 

On 4chan, users ridiculed women participating in the movement as “ugly, dramatic whores,” “batshit crazy [women] who hates children,” looked forward to them “[dying] of suicide or alcoholism,” and comparing them to “anti-white negroes.” The derision escalated into threats, with one commenter threatening that their “answer to the 4B movement” is “the 1R movement (The R stands for rape).” 

A Telegram page dedicated to the white supremacist National Justice Party, many of whose founding members attended the deadly 2017 “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., made a post negatively commenting on the appearances of women discussing the 4b movement on TikTok, saying they “look like they’re going to be extremely successful with it”, saying they “look like they’re going to be extremely successful with it”

The Proud Boys Upstate NY called women who announced their participation in the 4b movement “sluts,” and claimed that they are “already going through withdrawal from lack of dick.”

Some users on Twitter spread hateful comments about women taking part in the 4b movement, including common insinuations that women who advocate for bodily autonomy, including abortion, only do so to be promiscuous. One post by “Declaration of Memes” combines The Handmaid’s Tale imagery with Barbie along with “4b” rhetoric to claim that abortion rights only exist to serve women without “discipline.” At the time of publishing, the post has over 2.5 million views on Twitter.

There is a major cause for concern as new ways of spreading violent misogyny continue to fester in both the fringe and on  mainstream online platforms. We should be especially concerned about those referencing Trump, who was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming journalist E. Jean Carroll, and Trump’s and J.D. Vance’s derogatory comments about women, to justify the mass rape of women in the United States. Many of these online actors believe they have been given permission, or will face few consequences, because their views seem to align with those of the president and vice-president elect. 4chan’s connection to real-world violence combined with the ever-growing emboldened extremists’ calls for violence against women online may serve as an indicator for both continued, and escalating, offline misogynistic violence.

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Oklahoma State Department of Education Supt. Walters Announcement Regarding the Department of Religious Freedom and Patriotism

 

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"Makes us look like Nazis": Trump allies asked to stop talking about mass deportation "camps"

The president-elect's advisers worry about how the word "camp" plays as they plot mass deportation schemes

https://www.salon.com/2024/11/16/makes-us-look-like-nazis-allies-asked-to-stop-talking-about-mass-deportation-camps/

Donald Trump’s allies have been told to stop saying the quiet part out loud.

Rolling Stone reports that MAGA associates have been asked to stop using the word “camps” to describe potential facilities that would be used to house people rounded up in a massive deportation operation.

“I have received some guidance to avoid terms, like ‘camps,’ that can be twisted and used against the president, yes,” one Trump ally told the outlet. “Apparently, some people think it makes us look like Nazis.”

Advisers have cautioned surrogates and allies to keep the charged term out of their remarks, Rolling Stone claims, to avoid “the concentration camps framing” that dogged Trump's campaign. Coupled with Trump's heated rhetoric comparing undocumented immigrants to “animals” and saying they are “poisoning the blood of our country,” detractors didn't need to reach too far to find parallels to Nazi Germany. 

Former House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn took it a step further on Saturday morning, agreeing that Trump was "another Hitler” in an interview with Fox News.

The “camps” language is one Trump’s team had embraced during the election cycle. Stephen Miller, who Trump tapped to be his deputy chief of staff of policy, specifically used the word “camps” to describe holding facilities that he hoped the military could put together.

Trump's prospective "border czar," Tom Homan, shied away from the camp talk late last month in an interview with "60 Minutes."

“It’s not gonna be a mass sweep of neighborhoods," he said. "It’s not gonna be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous."

As the second Trump term approaches, however, Homan's become a little more forthright about his deportation plans. He likened the early days of the Trump administration to the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“I got three words for them – shock and awe,” he said in an interview with Donald Trump Jr. earlier this week. "You’re going to see us take this country back."

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Trump just fell under 50% of the popular vote (obviously this has no official bearing on the results, but it takes away a major RW talking point).

He will continue to fall as almost all of the remaining votes left to count (2.1 % or so of the total vote nationally is still not counted) are in Democratic heavy west coast states.

Harris has a fighting shot at losing by less than 2 million votes.

All the RW media is still claiming she lost by 8 million or more, which is a pure lie.

 

Even newer update

https://decisiondeskhq.com/results/2024/General/President/

Harris

73,846,238 votes

Trump

76,498,296 votes

2,652,058 difference, and getting closer

tracking atm to be just under under a 2 million vote diffrence given the way the remaining votes are breaking

still over 3.5 or so million votes to count

 

[Vesper 30,085]

3 simple reasons (there are others as well) why some of Trump's major initiatives (if he actually does them, and about which I see no reason to think he will not) will RAISE consumer prices, not lower them.

Tariffs will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices (especially goods made in China, which will have the highest tariffs and represent a massive part of US imports).

Allowing more monopolistic practices (ie weakening antitrust enforcement) by predatory large corporations will increase costs as it removes downward pricing competition forces.

Substantially lowering the amount of workers will increase labour costs, which will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher end-pricing structures.

 

[cosmicway 1,333]

I don't know what sort of Chinese stuff people buy.
I would n't buy because they are communist products, but I don't always look.
My sister wanted an luminous alarm clock.
First we went to a Swedish shop, not Ikea some other name. But they had ran out of clocks.
Then on the way back there was another shop with electronic gadgets and we went in and it was Chinese.
As she was looking around the various types of clock I said "huh Chinese" and one of the Chinese employees turned around and gave me a brief murderous look.
She bought one in the end.
But suppose those become expensive due to tariffs.
Then we have to wait for the Swedish shop to bring clocks.
Is it necessary to buy something Chinese, other than bamboo sticks ?
Or will the Sewdes also increase their prices ?