Tuesday, September 20, 2016
Turn
In a four-way match up of likely voters, Clinton leads Trump by 5 points—45 percent to 40 percent. Libertarian Gary Johnson now has 10 percent support and Jill Stein maintains 4 percent.
Debates
Lauer seemed to think Clinton’s emails were worthy of more questions than, say, nuclear war, global warming or the fate of Syrian refugees.
have turned the campaign and the upcoming debates into profit centers that reap a huge return from political trivia and titillation. A game show, if you will — a farcical theater of make-believe rigged by the two parties and the networks to maintain their cartel of money and power.
“Debating,” Jill Lepore writes, “like voting, is a way for people to disagree without hitting one another or going to war: it’s the key to every institution that makes civic life possible, from courts to legislatures. Without debate, there can be no self-government.” But the media monoliths have taken the democratic purpose of a televised debate — to inform the public on the issues and the candidates’ positions on them — and reduced it to a mock duel between the journalists who serve as moderators — too often surrendering their allegedly inquiring minds — and candidates who know they can simply blow past the questions with lies that go unchallenged, evasions that fear no rebuke and demagoguery that fears no rebuttal.
Remember that it was CBS CEO Leslie Moonves who whooped about the cash to be made from the campaign, telling an investors conference in February, “The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us... Bring it on, Donald. Keep going. Donald’s place in this election is a good thing.” Oh, yes, good for Moonves’ annual bonus, but good for democracy? Don’t make us laugh. Elaine Quijano of CBS News will be moderating the vice presidential candidates’ debate on Oct. 4, with Moonves looking over her shoulder.
Remember, too, that both Lauer and Trump are NBCUniversal celebrities who have earned millions from and for the networks. (Vanity Fair magazine even reported that NBCUniversal boss Steve Burke had spoken hypothetically with Trump about continuing The Apprentice from the White House.) Moderating the first presidential debate on Sept. 26 is NBC anchorman Lester Holt, a nice and competent fellow, but facing the same pressure as his fellow teammate Matt Lauer to not offend their once-and-possibly-future NBC star Donald Trump.
And remember that Anderson Cooper of Time-Warner’s CNN, the all-Trump-all-the-time network, and Martha Raddatz of Disney’s ABC News will anchor the second presidential debate (to her credit, Raddatz did a good job during the 2012 vice presidential debate) — and that the final, crucial close encounter between Trump and Clinton will be moderated by Chris Wallace of Fox, the very “news organization” that joined with Donald Trump to gleefully spread the Big Lie of Birtherism that served Trump so well with free publicity (and Fox so well with ratings) and that Trump now conveniently and hypocritically repents.
Wallace has already admitted he is in no position to hold Trump accountable for the lies he tells in the “debate” — that “it’s not my job” to fact check either Trump or Clinton during the course of their appearance with him. That should be pleasing to Roger Ailes, who was fired as head of the Fox News empire for scandalous sexist behavior but who is now giving Trump debate tips. Wallace is on record saying how much he admired and loved Ailes, to whom he owes his stardom at Fox — “The best boss I’ve had in almost a half a century in journalism,” Wallace said.
A Tight Race
NPR Battleground Map: A Path To The Presidency Opens Up For Trump
The debates are the last best chance for either candidate to change the trajectory of the race. And, right now, they could be key in determining who wins, because the election looks to be at an inflection point.
Grrl, Interrupted
Why Hillary Clinton Gets Interrupted More than Donald Trump
Lauer behaved toward the presidential candidates in a way that was consistent with much of the research about gender stereotypes and discrimination. Specifically, he interrupted Clinton more often than Trump, asked her more challenging questions, and questioned her statements more often.
Harvard MBA students evaluated the same case study of a successful entrepreneur. Half the class read a version in which the entrepreneur was male; the other half read a version in which the entrepreneur was female. The students who read about the male entrepreneur identified him as having positive traits, such as leadership and direction, while students who read about the female entrepreneur characterized her as being bossy and overly direct. The responses reflected the students’ hidden biases about how male and female leaders should act.
the more convinced we are of our own objectivity, the more likely bias is to creep in and influence our judgment and decisions.
Going Blue
Why so many red states are turning blue
TheWashington Post just polled all 50 states. Trump is getting an absolute majority of the vote in six states: Alabama, Kentucky, North Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming.
Monday, September 19, 2016
Disaster Candidate Trump
Donald Trump would be an absolute disaster of a president — so bad it's almost impossible to grasp.
Trump's real estate development record is mixed at best, and several forays outside property ownership and management — be it education, food, or gambling — all ignominiously collapsed. At bottom, the Trump business formula is simple: Borrow a ton of money, invest in real estate during a boom, cash out the equity to a protected location, then declare bankruptcy after the market turns. This is an effective strategy when conditions are right, but it is purely taking advantage of external conditions. No business is really happening. It's pure parasitism. (It's unclear whether Trump even understands this is his strategy.)
Third, domestic policy. Trump does not have a remotely comprehensive policy platform. He clearly has no interest in building one. He clearly is unable to build one.
Trump constantly (and inadvertently) reveals his staggering ignorance of the most basic facts of government and recent history. Trump didn't know that Russia had annexed Crimea. He didn't know what Brexit was. He didn't know that the Trans-Pacific Partnership does not include China. He is very obviously a guy who gets his news from half-watching cable TV and the racists in his Twitter mentions.
When NBC News attempted to compile a list of every Trump flip-flop, they came up with 117 major changes in positions — and that's likely an underestimate, since it was published a few days ago. Even on his signature issues — the border wall that Mexico is supposedly going to pay for, and banning all Muslim entry into the United States — Trump is all over the place. One day it's round up and deport all 11 million unauthorized immigrants and ban Muslim immigration, the next it's a path to citizenship, and only partial Muslim restrictions, then back to mass deportation.
Insofar as one can discern any sort of domestic agenda through his blizzard of nonsense and rapidly shifting positions, Trump's favorite things are discriminating against Latinos and Muslims. The political forces behind him include a sizable fraction of straight-up white nationalists.
Over and above his threats against a free press, Trump's campaign has been the most overtly violent in living memory. His rallies have seen a steady stream of violence since early in the primary — most recently, a Trumpist socked a 69-year-old woman on oxygen right in the face. Trump has incited and encouraged this violence, telling his rallies that violence is acceptable, refusing to condemn such behavior when journalists ask, and even saying he might pay the legal bills for a man arrested for allegedly assaulting someone at a rally (though Trump, as usual, later insisted he had done no such thing).
Trump's campaign has accomplished the greatest legitimization of political violence since white supremacist "Redeemers" violently overthrew democratically elected Reconstruction governments in the 1870s. He represents a movement of proto-fascism that will probably endure long after he is gone.
Trump's foreign policy might well be corrupt. As Kurt Eichenwald details in Newsweek, Trump is involved in dozens of shady business and real estate deals overseas through the Trump Organization — in South Korea, India, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere. It would be almost impossible for Trump to conduct foreign policy without hitting conflicts of interest. Not that he would care about such things; instead, he would almost certainly attempt to leverage the power of the presidency to secure more lucrative deals for himself. Profit and self-promotion are the only consistent notes in the life story of Donald Trump.
Scholars argue that democracies are more stable than monarchies in part because they can survive a bad leader or two. But the flexibility is not endless. Donald Trump might well bend the rickety American constitutional system past the breaking point. Don't let him.
A Trump Scare
President Trump’s First Term - The New Yorker
Nothing in the campaign has presented Trump with a broader range of new information than the realm of foreign affairs. Asked about the Quds Force, an Iranian paramilitary unit, he has expressed his view of “the Kurds,” an ethnic group. During a debate in December, 2015, a moderator requested his view of the “nuclear triad,” the cornerstone of American nuclear strategy—bombers, land-based missiles, and submarine-launched missiles—and it became clear that Trump had no idea what the term meant. Trump replied, “I think, to me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.”
Trump is not uniformly isolationist; he has affirmative ideas, some of which have produced effects outside his control. When he labelled Obama “the founder of isis,” the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah rejoiced. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who is allied with President Bashar al-Assad, of Syria, against isis, has claimed that the U.S. created extremist groups in order to sow chaos in the Middle East. Now, it seemed, Trump was confirming it. “This is an American Presidential candidate,” Nasrallah said on television. “This was spoken on behalf of the American Republican Party. He has data and documents.”
Other militant organizations, includingisis, featured Trump’s words and image in recruiting materials. A recruitment video released in January by Al Shabaab, the East African militant group allied with Al Qaeda, showed Trump calling for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S.; the video warned, “Tomorrow, it will be a land of religious discrimination and concentration camps.”
In July, Trump made his most dramatic foray into foreign policy, declaring that if Baltic members ofnato are attacked he would decide whether to defend them on the basis of whether they had “fulfilled their obligations to us.” I asked the President of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, what he made of that. Ilves rejected the suggestion that his country has not done its part for nato. “Estonia has not sat back and waited for allies to take care of its security,” he said. “Indeed, proportionally to our size, we were one of the greatest contributors to the mission in Afghanistan.” Without mentioning Trump’s name, he warned against improvising on matters of foreign policy involving President Vladimir Putin, of Russia: “Russia’s aggression against Ukraine—and the impact that Russian policies and actions toward neighboring countries have had on European security as a whole—marks a paradigm shift, the end of trust in the post-Cold War order.”
Shlapak said that in the spring of 2014, after Russia seized Crimea, “the question surfaced: What could Russia do to nato, if it was inclined to?” To test the proposition, rand organized a series of war games, sponsored by the Pentagon, involving military officers, strategists, and others, to examine what would happen if Russia attacked the three most vulnerable nato nations—the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia.
To his surprise, the simulated Russian forces reached the outskirts of the Estonian and Latvian capitals in as little as thirty-six hours. The larger shock was the depth of destruction. American forces, which would deploy from Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, are not heavily armored. “In twelve hours, more Americans die than in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined, in sixteen years,” Shlapak said. “In twelve hours, the U.S. Air Force loses more airplanes than it’s lost in every engagement since Vietnam, combined.” He went on, “In our base case, the Russians bring about four hundred and fifty tanks to the fight, and nato brings none. So it turns into a fight of steel against flesh.” (Based on the games, randrecommended that nato assign three heavily armored brigades to the Baltic states.)
“We’ve had seventy years of great-power peace, which is the longest period in post-Westphalian history,” Shlapak said. “I think one of the reasons we don’t think about that, or don’t understand the value of that, is that it’s been so long since we’ve been face to face with the prospect of that kind of conflict.”
the surge of hostility from American politicians will weaken Mexico’s commitment to help the United States with counter-terrorism
raids on farms, restaurants, factories, and construction sites would require more than ninety thousand “apprehension personnel”—six times the number of special agents in the F.B.I. Beds for captured men, women, and children would reach 348,831, nearly triple the detention space required for the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Thousands of chartered buses (fifty-four seats on average) and planes (which can accommodate a hundred and thirty-five) would carry deportees to the border or to their home countries. The report estimated the total cost at six hundred billion dollars
Gingrich called for re-creating the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was established in 1938 to investigate accusations of subversion and disloyalty. “We’re going to presently have to go take the similar steps here,” he said, on Fox News. “We’re going to ultimately declare a war on Islamic supremacists, and we’re going to say, If you pledge allegiance toisis, you are a traitor and you have lost your citizenship.” The committee is not often praised; before it was abolished, in 1975, it had laid the groundwork for the internment of Japanese-Americans, and led investigations into alleged Communist sympathizers. In 1959, former President Harry S. Truman called it the “most un-American thing in the country today.”
Paul Krugman, the left-leaning Nobel laureate, argued that the supply-side argument was refuted by a basic fact: job growth has been higher under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama than under George W. Bush.
To deal with China, he says, the United States should act like an aggressive patient at a dentist’s office: “Here’s how the patient deals with the dentist: sits down in the chair, grabs the dentist by the nuts, and says, ‘You don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you.’ ”
The Economist Intelligence Unit, an economic-and-geopolitical-analysis firm, has ranked the prospect of a Trump victory on its top-ten risks to the global economy. Larry Summers, the Harvard professor and former Treasury Secretary, predicts that, taken together, Trump’s economic and trade policies would help trigger a protracted recession within eighteen months.
Trump’s trade plan could trigger a trade war that would put roughly four million Americans out of work, and cost the economy three million jobs that would have been created in Trump’s absence.
Trump, whose businesses have declared bankruptcy four times, said, “I’ve borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts,” and “if the economy crashed you could make a deal.” The notion that he might try to make creditors accept less than full payment on U.S. government debt caused an outcry.
“If he ever even alludes to renegotiating the debt, we will have a downgrade of U.S. debt, and that event will cause a massive exodus of foreign investors from the U.S. Treasury market.” In 2011, when feuding in Congress delayed raising the debt limit, the stock market fell seventeen per cent. This would be a far larger event.
Listening To The People
A small d democrat listens to the people even when they don't vote for them. This is no time to write off the working class.
Sin has to be confronted. Evil has to be confronted. Racism, misogyny, xenophobia are all evil, to be confronted.
But there are genuine concerns. The number one reason behind the meltdown of 2008 is not because bankers are evil people but because finance globalized but the politicians did not create a world government to go with it. They still have not done that.
Primarily due to the fast changing world of technological innovation we are about to enter the era of hypercapitalism. So far it has been liquid water physics. Soon it will be steam physics. But political and economic theorists lag far behind. Academics have been behind the curve.
In hypercapitalism you take one world government, one global economy for granted and you put human capital on equal pedestal with financial capital and technological capital. Later on a universal basic income is introduced.
None of this is part of the political conversation. And people feel like they are running blind.
Years ago there were random fires across Greece because it had become unusually dry. The culprit was global warming. But the local police started rounding up the known arsonists.
Jobs are disappearing in China also. Most jobs that are being lost in America are being lost to automation. Not to Mexicans or the Chinese. But Trump is laying the blame on the Mexicans. That is scapegoating. That is flagrant demagoguery. That is racist and offensive.
Sin leads to collapse and unhappiness. Racism, sexism, xenophobia are sin. Trump is a Pied Piper, leading people to ruin.
Humanity is at the cusp of potentially the most exciting era in human history. There are choices to make and decisions to take. It will not automatically happen.
The Trump pessimism is highly misguided.
Racism is its own fact. Hatred is its own fact. And Trump is peddling it.
Sunday, September 18, 2016
Trump Who?
Biologically speaking Donald Trump is a chimpanzee. I did not say that although I have been feeling it. A leading primatologist said that.
His psychological profile is that he is a bully, a narcissist.
His political ideology is he is a fascist.
His business profile is he is a fraudster.
His spiritual profile is he is Satanic.
His media profile is he is a demagogue.
His social media profile is he is Alt Right. That is the new name the white supremacists call themselves.
On trade and immigration he is an isolationist.
On nuclear weapons, he is strike first ask later.
On NATO he is a dismantlist.
On tax cuts he is super rich.
His canine profile is he is cute.
On the budget he is anti arithmetic.
On climate change he is "I believe there is weather."
On the wall, he is Brooklyn Bridge. "There is a bridge on the East River I would like to sell you."
On campaign finance he is pay yourself.
On fast food he is quick.
On comedy shows he is all hair and no cattle.
The Very Real Dangers Of A Donald Trump
“History tells us what may happen next with Brexit & Trump”
we need to avoid getting lost in arguing through facts and logic, and counter the populist messages of passion and anger with our own similar messages. We need to understand and use social media. We need to harness a different fear. Fear of another World War nearly stopped World War 2, but didn’t.We need to avoid our own echo chambers. Trump and Putin supporters don’t read the Guardian, so writing there is just reassuring our friends. We need to find a way to bridge from our closed groups to other closed groups, try to cross the ever widening social divides