The U.S. Virgin Islands just became the only territory or state in the country to give all of its delegates (pledged and super) to Hillary Clinton. She carried the islands by an 84.2%-12.2% margin, winning seven delegates in the process and securing their four superdelegates, as well. According to the Associated Press she now needs a mere 60 delegates from the huge haul on Tuesday to secure the nomination.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
She’ll get the lion share from Puerto Rico today as well, she’ll likely have the delegates she needs well before CA finishes voting on Tuesday.
And there hasn’t been much polling from New Jersey but what there is shows her way ahead there. Lots more delegates to harvest.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/nj/new_jersey_democratic_presidential_primary
-3443.html
right, last poll I saw shows her up 27%
Excuse me. I posted the preceding blank by accident. I have nothing to say. Slow news day: POFF, BOMM, Tuesday.
If you’re looking for a story that acually matters, how about Andrew Cuomo signing an executive order that bans business with Israel-boycott companies?
This is the same wing I see Clinton being comfortable with. Maybe she’ll try to do the same nationally.
link
? ” U.S. law doesn’t bar U.S. citizens from organizing boycotts of anything or any country, or participating in boycotts of anything or any country, that are organized by domestic or foreign individuals or organizations. What U.S. law bars is participation in unsanctioned boycotts and embargoes imposed by other countries that conflict with U.S. policies — including but not limited to the (effectively moribund) Arab League boycott of Israel.’
Has anything changed?
Is that even legal?
She’s never said or done anything to indicate she’d support this kind of thing. So basically you have to imagine things to find something to criticize Hillary about?
She’s consistently spoken out in her opposition to BDS and has made it a point that she will break from Obama’s mold of giving them everything they want to…well idk how you get to give them more than they’re already been given. Fewer sternly worded letters?
Also Chuck Schumer is likely to be the Majority Leader. If anything passes the Senate at his behest, you think Clinton vetoes? Lol.
That didn’t take long:
link
will be “Clinton Clinches Nomination” virtually regardless of who wins California?
At the moment, that would appear to be the case.
yes since the results in CA will not change the results of the nomination process regardless of who actually wins
If Bernie wins California, the narrative will be “Clinton wins the nomination, but this is a black eye, and she’s in trouble. The Democrats are in disarray!”
If Clinton wins California, the narrative will be “Clinton wins the nomination, but will Bernie fight to the convention and damage her? The Democrats are in disarray!”
Clinton supporters and people who can do math will note, again, that she won a majority of pledged delegates and votes. They will note this means she has won, fair and square, and should be the nominee as the choice of the voters.
A subset of Sanders supporters who are very loud and irrational on the blogs and social media will then respond by tying themselves in knots trying to rationalize convincing the superdelegates to overturn the choice of the voters. They will point to a bunch of polls whose unreliability has been explained to them about 10,000 times now. They will threaten to vote for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson or Trump. They will call superdelegates names and accuse everybody of being part of the corrupt establishment they’re trying to convince.
To what should be the surprise of no one, this will fail, and the remaining superdelegates will largely announce their support of Clinton throughout the day tomorrow and then tomorrow night as polls close and the pledged delegate majority is secured.
Bernie will give a speech, rightly noting his campaign’s accomplishments. He may or may not say something combative. He may or may not say he’s going to think about how to proceed.
From there, it could go a number of different ways, depending on Bernie’s state of mind.
My guess is Bernie’s not completely irrational, so: He’ll go home to lick his wounds a bit. He will likely not drop out for a week or so. Maybe two if he wants to stick around for DC. Clinton will reach out to him behind the scenes and see what he wants. He will tell her. He will probably ask that DWS step aside, and that Hillary support him on some policy matters and some reforms in the primary system. She will agree to these things. The press will hyperventilate the entire time about disunity among Dems in between segments on whatever crazy shit Trump has said on a given day. Bernie will drop out, endorse Clinton, and they’ll go on a unity tour together leading up to Philly.
Sounds about right. Lots of “we have more in common than what divides us” and the greater danger Trump represents. All in all, standard Kabuki, and not damaging for the future. If anything it has kept her campaign alive and in the news for a bit longer.
I will however be interested in her choice of VP. Someone who can really get under Trump’s skin would be good. Franken?
Obama already spoke with Sanders over the weekend and will apparently be the guy to broker a truce.
I’ve no idea who the Veep will be. My guess is one of Perez, Kaine or Warren.
I take it that this is the actual pledged delegate count of the moment:
The total number of pledged delegates is 4051, one-half of which is 2026.
Clinton has 250 pledged delegates to go to get 50% + 1 of pledged delegates.
Sanders has 525 pledged delegates to go to get 50% + 1 of pledged delegates.
Then the party elders, the true power under this system bargain for a deal between now and the convention. And the question that they face, according to the conventional wisdom is how badly they want to stiff Sanders’s supporters.
That question likely is calculated according to how many of Sanders’s supporters they estimate they can bring over for the general election.
I hope they get this decision right. Because neither the Sanders-side risk nor the Clinton-side risk are well known.
If Clinton decides to shift to being a Sanders agenda President, what are the downside risks if that is an honest change is direction instead of a campaign ploy?
There is a reason that both Clinton’s and Sander’s arguments are being made to the superdelegates who are supposed to save them from another Walter Mondale.
“the superdelegates who are supposed to save them from another Walter Mondale.” Actually, they’re there to save the Democrats from another George McGovern or Jimmy Carter. Superdelegates were in place in 1984 and they nominated Walter Mondale. Hey, when the alternative is Gary Hart, you make the best choice out of those available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate#Election_of_1984
Oh, so the greatest post-President in history was their mark of a failure.
Apparently, yes. That doesn’t make them look good in hindsight.
The conventional wisdom of the period was a major limitation on the Carter administration as was his political environment in Georgia, where Democrats had always been “business friendly” and not necessarily economically smart.
They didn’t have a choice with Carter. He had something like 8 times the delegates of the #2 contender, Mo Udall.
After looking at the variance on Nate Silver’s model, my sense is that Clinton’s worst case is a 130-pledged delegate advantage.
That puts her statistically close to the median of the Democratic Party sentiment. What that median sentiment is and how wide the variance can extend without self-contradiction are the issues the negotiation between the primary candidates and the convention will have to settle.
It also puts Bernie Sanders close to the median of Democratic Party sentiment. Treating his positions as “far out” will likely be self-defeating.
Merkley for VP. Do it fast, in agreement with Sanders, and call it a day.
It isn’t a day until the primaries are actually over. Pollsters don’t decide elections; voters do.
A probability is only an expected value, not an order to the universe. Events can and do fall into the extreme tails of probability distributions.
I’m still reluctant to raid Congress of good people just to make them Vice-President to a strong-willed President. I think Hilda Solis or even Thomas Perez might be good Vice Presidents.
I want Merkeley to stay on the Agriculture or Environment and Public Works committees as ranking member. His rise to chair would be important on either one. And it is one less Senate seat to have to replace.
Agree. Why waste a progressive voice in an admin that will be neoliberal? Tokenism convinces no one.
And what would be the elements of a neoliberal administration vs. say a neoliberal administration like Reagan’s?
Would a non-neoliberal administration hugely increase the military to eliminate private contracting?
Any other specific ideas for how a non-neoliberal might change the shape of our government?
Any ideas that have a prayer of passing through Congress?
Is a non-neoliberal administration going to abandon all the work that’s been done with our Pacific allies on crafting trade agreements? How would they reestablish these alliances and avoid them moving to China in a bloc?
I have no idea how you want policy-wise, or how you envision the next administration conducting its foreign policy in the Pacific.
What’s the difference between being a committed neoliberal ideologue like most conservatives and being a practical progressive who seeks to expand access to health care or regulate Wall Street in a world where conservatives either control Congress or at least some of them must be won over for compromise reforms?
I honestly have no idea what people think they mean by the term neoliberal, and I don’t think most people have the slightest clue what they’re talking about when they use the term.
It’s just the laziest most annoying term and it requires people to explain what the fuck they’re talking about every single time.
Which I generally take care to do in specific cases, if you have not noticed. But maybe you don’t bother to read my posts and links.
You seem irrational on the subject.
I’ve enjoyed learning about neoliberalism on the pond. As a result, I think I know it when I see it. However, some people don’t read Booman, so they may not know the specific term. No reason to panic, though, since quite a few people know something is wrong out there. When those people or their family or friends get screwed by the system, they just scream “a pox on both their houses” and become angrier and more bewildered.
Not that you would probably be open to this, but there is alternative thinking going on…
The Next System founding essay.
We are at or near the bottom among advanced democracies across a score of key indicators of national well-being–including relative poverty, inequality, education, social mobility, health, environment, militarization, democracy, and more.
We have fundamental problems because of fundamental flaws in our economic and political system. The crisis now unfolding in so many ways across our country amounts to a systemic crisis.
Today’s political economic system is not programmed to secure the wellbeing of people, place and planet. Instead, its priorities are corporate profits, the growth of GDP, and the projection of national power.
Large-scale system change is needed but has until recently been constrained by a continuing lack of imagination concerning social, economic and political alternatives. There are alternatives that can lead to the systemic change we need.
What’s next? Take a look at the signatories.
http://thenextsystem.org/
it’s basically an epithet at this point, there’s no meaning in the word that everyone can agree on
I’m sure they’ll be a rash of comments saying what they mean by it but what they mean isn’t what’s agreed upon it’s just what they mean
It would be helpful to just say what they mean or what they’re against
At this point, whenever I see “neoliberal” hurled at someone, I translate it as “poopyhead” and accord it about as much weight.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2016/6/5/133429/9450#119
No. If one sees a word one does not understand, the best source is original material. Look it up for yourself. Or not.
the textbook definition isn’t the way everyone uses it, if you have a point to make then make it instead of throwing out a word that everyone doesn’t agree on
That may be so, but the context usually gives you a clue what someone is talking about and a good deal of the time it has to do with private interests as opposed to the public purpose. You know profits for me. Government, if would appear, is unable to fix our ills – according to some. Socialism, you know.
some people explain what they mean but most don’t, many just throw out neoliberal like it explains things and it explains nothing
to mean what they mean.
that would be true if everyone agreed on their meaning which hardly anyone does
all the words out there.
Guess we better just dispense with using words then.
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2016/6/5/133429/9450#119
unless you’re willing to post the definition you’re using every time you use the word then wouldn’t it just make more sense to just spell out what you’re saying?
. . . shortness of time or duration; briefness :
the brevity of human life.
2. the quality of expressing much in few words; terseness:
Ironically, it is long-winded Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet who famously says that brevity is the soul of wit.]
is
[‘verb 1. 3rd person singular present indicative of be.
Idioms 2. as is. as1(def 23).]
the
[‘definite article
1.
(used, especially before a noun, with a specifying or particularizing effect, as opposed to the indefinite or generalizing force of the indefinite article a or an):
the book you gave me; Come into the house.
2.
(used to mark a proper noun, natural phenomenon, ship, building, time, point of the compass, branch of endeavor, or field of study as something well-known or unique):
the sun; the Alps; theQueen Elizabeth; the past; the West.
3.
(used with or as part of a title):
the Duke of Wellington; the Reverend John Smith.
4.
(used to mark a noun as indicating the best-known, most approved, most important, most satisfying, etc.):
the skiing center of the U.S.; If you’re going to work hard, now is the time.
5.
(used to mark a noun as being used generically):
The dog is a quadruped.
6.
(used in place of a possessive pronoun, to note a part of the body or a personal belonging):
He won’t be able to play football until the leg mends.
7.
(used before adjectives that are used substantively, to note an individual, a class or number of individuals, or an abstract idea):
to visit the sick; from the sublime to the ridiculous.
8.
(used before a modifying adjective to specify or limit its modifying effect):
He took the wrong road and drove miles out of his way.
9.
(used to indicate one particular decade of a lifetime or of a century):
the sixties; the gay nineties.
10.
(one of many of a class or type, as of a manufactured item, as opposed to an individual one):
Did you listen to the radio last night?
11.
enough:
He saved until he had the money for a new car. She didn’t have the courage to leave.
12.
(used distributively, to note any one separately) for, to, or in each; a or an:
at one dollar the pound.’]
soul
[‘noun
1.
the principle of life, feeling, thought, and action in humans, regarded as a distinct entity separate from the body, and commonly held to be separable in existence from the body; the spiritual part of humans as distinct from the physical part.
2.
the spiritual part of humans regarded in its moral aspect, or as believed to survive death and be subject to happiness or misery in a life to come:
arguing the immortality of the soul.
3.
the disembodied spirit of a deceased person:
He feared the soul of the deceased would haunt him.
4.
the emotional part of human nature; the seat of the feelings or sentiments.
5.
a human being; person.
6.
high-mindedness; noble warmth of feeling, spirit or courage, etc.
7.
the animating principle; the essential element or part of something.
8.
the inspirer or moving spirit of some action, movement, etc.
9.
the embodiment of some quality:
He was the very soul of tact.
10.
(initial capital letter) Christian Science. God; the divine source of all identity and individuality.
11.
shared ethnic awareness and pride among black people, especially black Americans.
12.
deeply felt emotion, as conveyed or expressed by a performer or artist.
13.
soul music.
adjective
14.
of, characteristic of, or for black Americans or their culture:
soul newspapers.’]
of
[‘ preposition
1.
(used to indicate distance or direction from, separation, deprivation, etc.):
within a mile of the church; south of Omaha; to be robbed of one’s money.
2.
(used to indicate derivation, origin, or source):
a man of good family; the plays of Shakespeare; a piece of cake.
3.
(used to indicate cause, motive, occasion, or reason):
to die of hunger.
4.
(used to indicate material, component parts, substance, or contents):
a dress of silk; an apartment of three rooms; a book of poems; a package of cheese.
5.
(used to indicate apposition or identity):
Is that idiot of a salesman calling again?
6.
(used to indicate specific identity or a particular item within a category):
the city of Chicago; thoughts of love.
7.
(used to indicate possession, connection, or association):
the king of France; the property of the church.
8.
(used to indicate inclusion in a number, class, or whole):
one of us.
9.
(used to indicate the objective relation, the object of the action noted by the preceding noun or the application of a verb or adjective):
the ringing of bells; He writes her of home; I’m tired of working.
10.
(used to indicate reference or respect):
There is talk of peace.
11.
(used to indicate qualities or attributes):
an ambassador of remarkable tact.
12.
(used to indicate a specified time):
They arrived of an evening.
13.
Chiefly Northern U.S. before the hour of; until:
twenty minutes of five.
14.
on the part of:
It was very mean of you to laugh at me.
15.
in respect to:
fleet of foot.
16.
set aside for or devoted to:
a minute of prayer.
17.
Archaic. by:
consumed of worms.’]
wit
[‘noun
1.
the keen perception and cleverly apt expression of those connections between ideas that awaken amusement and pleasure.
Synonyms: drollery, facetiousness, waggishness, repartee.
2.
speech or writing showing such perception and expression.
Synonyms: banter, joking, witticism, quip, raillery, badinage, persiflage; bon mot.
3.
a person having or noted for such perception and expression.
Synonyms: wag, jester, epigrammatist, satirist.
4.
understanding, intelligence, or sagacity; astuteness.
Synonyms: wisdom, sense, mind.
5.
Usually, wits.
powers of intelligent observation, keen perception, ingenious contrivance, or the like; mental acuity, composure, and resourcefulness:
using one’s wits to get ahead.
Synonyms: cleverness, cunning, wisdom, insight, perspicacity, sacaciousness, acumen.
mental faculties; senses:
to lose one’s wits; frightened out of one’s wits.
Synonyms: mind, sanity; brains, marbles.
Idioms
6.
at one’s wit’s end, at the end of one’s ideas or mental resources; perplexed:
My two-year-old won’t eat anything but pizza, and I’m at my wit’s end.
7.
keep /have one’s wits about one, to remain alert and observant; be prepared for or equal to anything:
to keep your wits about you in a crisis.
8.
live by one’s wits, to provide for oneself by employing ingenuity or cunning; live precariously:
We traveled around the world, living by our wits.’]
.
Perhaps you begin now to see the (or at least “a”) problem with rejecting valid use of words to mean what they mean simply because some people sometimes don’t use them that way, and/or because some people refuse to inform themselves of what those perfectly good and useful words actually mean?
Or not. Perhaps ymmv.
As I just wrote elsewhere in this thread on the same subject, acceding to your (unreasonable, imo) demand is surrendering to propagandists and/or the ignorant. If someone is misusing a perfectly good word that has a clear meaning, the useful, valid thing to do is to address the particular misuse, not dismiss/banish all usage of a perfectly good, meaningful term. Of course, doing that implies first informing yourself about the actual meaning of the term.
Look,
These are patronizing, sanctimonious people, and they want to use neoliberal as a pejorative, while maintaining some high ground that only exists inside their heads.
It’s useless to call them out for them using the word as they intend to use it, as a pejorative, because they act all butt hurt and simply change the meaning. So it suits it’s purpose for the word to have no defined meaning.
When ever you see the word neoliberal, just translate it to the word they intend…..’asshole’.
.
When ever you see the word neoliberal, just translate it to the word you see…..’shibboleth’. FIFY
There’s simply no conflict/contradiction between using a word with pejorative intent and using it to mean what it means.
This should be obvious.
What “neoliberal” actually means conflicts with my values and policy preferences, so of course I disapprove what neoliberals do/promote. So of course if I use it, that comes with pejorative intent, but isn’t limited to that.
Nor would being “call[ed] out for . . . using the word as [I] intend to use it” (which would be a silly, wrong thing to “call [me] out” for in the first place) ever entail any need for me to “change the meaning”.
Because I use it to mean what it means, that that meaning is (by my lights) pejorative doesn’t change anything (nor require changing the meaning of “neoliberal”).
So, in fact, it “suits [MY] purpose for the word to have [A CLEARLY] defined meaning”, which is the meaning I use, thank you very much.
See how that works?
At least I know have an idea what Tarheel means when he uses the term, thanks to his post above. I agree that it seems to mean different things to different people. For me, it’s still vague , but not completely meaningless. When I hear the term I see an image of Tony Blair.
Tony Blair is not a bad poster child for what Europe has become as a result of neo-liberalism.
It was framed as the third way between Marxism and capitalism.
There might still be a third way. Even Marxism is dialectical, but the policies and logic pursued as a third way turned out to be merely co-option to business corporations with little public benefit.
That’s funny because I see Milton Friedman.
with the term?
Yes.
Jesus, according to that Reagan and Thatcher are neoliberals. Then the term is just a synonym for conservative.
Thatcher and Reagan WERE neoliberals. Eisenhower was not. Nixon was not. Carter was a business Dem, maybe a baby neolib?? But probably not. Bill Clinton was full blown.
When we claim “both sides do it”, we are not wrong, just politically incorrect. THAT was a great bit of jiu jitsu–to give OUR neolibs cover.
It’s only a synonym for conservative if you limit your set of conservatives to “mainstream Republicans and Tories of the post-Reagan/Thatcher era” and ignore the more populist ones and third-way types from the ’90s “center-left” like Blair and Clinton.
Well, exactly.
Calling Bill Clinton a “neoliberal” is (or was, at the beginning) little more than a way of calling him a Reaganite.
I mean, there was an insight there, which was that Clinton and Blair were not seeking to roll back every element of Thatcherism, and that they did see merit in some of the critiques of the welfare state coming out of right-wing think tanks and Milton Friedman’s army of economists.
But it was originally an epithet that was only slightly more enlightening than calling Clinton/Blair and the DLC crew a bunch of DINOs.
From the beginning, it just caused confusion, especially because on this side of the Pond, the Clinton movement was calling itself “New Democrats.” People took the two terms as interchangeable, when the truth was that one described Third Way Democrats and the other described anti-Keynesian and libertarian-minded conservative economic theorists. The two things were never remotely synonymous.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and what was once a fringe interpretation of all of this from dead-ender Marxists has become hopelessly muddled and is now thrown around like a manhole cover at a polite dinner party.
Barack Obama, who without question has a record for to the left of any president since at least LBJ, and far, far to the left of Jimmy Carter, and who pursued Keynesianism with gusto, is equated with the Monetarist lunatics who opposed stimulus spending during the economic collapse.
And why?
Because he wants to use free trade, as it always has been in the postwar era, as an organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy?
And even this is grossly exaggerated and completely misunderstood.
For one thing, Obama has treated TPP almost 100% as a cornerstone of his pivot to Asia. In other words, it’s much more about the State Department than promoting an economic ideology.
For another thing, he’s run with this thing for years now knowing full well that it was very unlikely to ever pass through Congress. Yet, he could never admit this to the governments in New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, or Indonesia because they would never work within his framework if he wasn’t acting serious about the premise of the construct.
What’s he gotten is mainly hysteria from his left, as if he’s trying to shove NAFTA on steroids down their throats, rather than trying to move our focus away from policing oil fields in a hostile and dysfunctional Middle East and towards building a 21st-Century coalition of like-minded economies to stand as an open-society bulwark against Chinese cultural expansion.
There’s an honest critique of his Pacific Pivot, but it’s rarely aired or even heard, because people would rather just throw the word “neoliberal” at him and think that explains something.
It really doesn’t.
Forget it, Boo; you’re arguing dogma with religious fanatics.
Actually, he’s arguing from a position of ignorance and denial with people who are well informed. Sad to see you spouting Hillbot crap.
btw — still waiting for you to state exactly what HRC has done and supported over the years and until today that makes you proud to stand with her. Only those issues where there is no meaningful difference between her and Sanders counts — and her position on any such issues must be long-standing and not merely convenient BS for the election. Such as: State Department Blocks Release Of Hillary Clinton-Era TPP Emails Until After The Election. Some of us don’t like to get “fooled again.”
On her page, she is agin’ TTP, which has drawn all the bad press, because “jobs”, but still favors TTIP, which is WORSE corporate sovereignty and will sure hit consumer protections badly.
She’ll filibuster and parse it should the day come when those she’s fooled again whisper foul.
someone using your signature line to have more appreciation for defending use of words to mean what they mean in order to further communication. As opposed to just throwing them out because some people sometimes misuse them.
In fact, he’s not (or at least not only) “arguing dogma with religious fanatics”, he’s arguing meanings of words with people who think such things matter. At least if communication is to be possible/happen, that is.
Hmm, a decent interpretation of Carter’s economic history. A bit different from yours. But he was responsible for Volker and the unintended consequences.
Jimmy Carter and the Ironies of American Liberalism
http://www.gettysburgreview.com/selections/past_selections/details.dot?inode=146100cf-f8f6-43de-bb07
-b3ba3f6890b7&pageTitle=Leo%20P.%20Ribuffo&crumbTitle=Jimmy%20Carter%20and%20the%20Ironies%2
0of%20American%20Liberalism&author=Leo%20P.%20Ribuffo&story=true
Also this, which pulls no punches.
The Missing Link to the Democratic Party’s Pivot to Wall Street
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/21/the-missing-link-to-the-democratic-partys-pivot-to-wall-stree
t/
Tell us, oh wise one, how
differ from Reaganomics? Why did the charter school movement pick up steam after WJC was elected and has been enshrined by Obama’s Duncan as the bestest way to get education public dollars to Wall St?
I’ll stop there because you won’t answer and will continue in your state of ignorant denial.
Forgot MFT with China.
Probably neglected a few more. Just hit the biggies that the neoliberal denialists should be familiar with. The Clinton-Gore “reinventing government” also falls within the neoliberal box but is somewhat more complicated as to following the money.
Maybe a better question is to figure out how it’s different from Carternomics.
Once you’ve got that distinction in place, then we can talk about distinctions from Reaganomics.
I mean, you’re panning Ralph Nader and Teddy Kennedy here and calling it Reaganomics, which I think is not going to help people understand anything important, or at least not what you’re hoping that they will understand.
“Carter, not Reagan, presided over the dismantling of the New Deal regulatory system in airlines, railroads and trucking. Intended to reduce inflation by reducing the costs of essential infrastructure to business, Carter’s market-oriented reforms have backfired, producing constant bankruptcies and predatory hub-and-spoke monopolies in the airline industry, an oligopolistic private railroad industry that has abandoned passenger rail for freight, and underpaid, overworked truckers.”
(http://www.salon.com/2011/02/08/lind_reaganism_carter/)
Yes, more unintended consequences of the wrong solutions to a huge problem (stagflation). But did it rise to a governing principle called neoliberalism or was it ad hoc?
Maybe you’re asking a good question but not in the right way.
You know, here you have Ralph Nader promoting deregulatory schemes in the name of consumer protection, and it’s indistinguishable from neoliberal ideological opposition to New Deal big government.
You’ve got Teddy Kennedy challenging the president from the left and saying he’s not doing enough neoliberalism.
So, that’s the context when Reagan is elected. And Reagan proceeds to fire the air traffic controllers and embark on far more widespread and controversial deregulatory and anti-New Deal schemes.
Then you enter a new phase where the old-line Democrats are getting slaughtered at the ballot box. And I mean slaughtered, losing control of the Senate for the first time in thirty years and getting absolutely blown out in presidential elections.
So, now you have to come up with new branding, new strategies, new ideas, or you’re just going to continue to lose ground to the Conservative Movement.
And then the Cold War ends, giving up an opportunity to downsize the government in ways that liberals actually approve.
It’s all very complicated and complex history that doesn’t lend itself to disparaging everyone involved as a neoliberal ideologue.
My interest isn’t so much to defend anyone or any policy as to have an intelligent discussion. What I object to with “neoliberalism” is that it doesn’t further intelligent discussion. It puts up a hurdle that confuses everything.
We still have not learned how to transition out of war stimulus into peacetime economy. We have our own brand of stagflation under way with near zero inflation and are having little success with our recent attempts to goose the economy with premature Fed rate increases. It seems to have put the kibosh on employment numbers. Oh, well…
Classical economics tells us that trade between countries is beneficial to both countries since each presumably will do those things and use those resources they are best able to do. The result is good for all. And it binds the countries together in a good friendly way.
But, once again, like other so called neo liberal ideas there often arises a slip along the way. So, in pursuit of profit, we find Carrier moving to Mexico and IBM doing software development in India. And the impetus behind that is, guess, profit arising from lower wages. Then this TPP thing is a corporate negotiated deal in secret. What can you expect but protections for drug companies, tobacco companies and, if that is not good enough there is an extra judicial three man court that will resolve differences. Never mind your laws or what you thought was fair. And this is not a small deal, it is quite comprehensive, I have read. So expect more movement of jobs out of the country. I would feel a lot better about this thing if it were negotiated in the open with independent parties reporting on it.
I have no idea if Bill Clinton was neo liberal but he gave us NAFTA, a crime bill, revised Aid to Dependent Children so that now someone wrote a book:$2 a day, living on almost nothing in America and he continued filling up prisons – private ones too. And then just to top it off, he did away with financial regulation.
The public private partnership has deteriorated to private use only and that includes interstate highways, schools and prisons. We have succeeded in drowning government in the bath tub it seems. I do agree that Obama made some effort to move left (sometime after the grand bargain and sequester) but not enough. I’d vote for him over Hillary again.
it mainly confirms my point: “neoliberal(ism)” is a meaningful, useful term which does not especially defy useful definition. (E.g., from your link [which definition doesn’t differ markedly from the one I provided previously]:
What has always seemed bizarre to me about your repeated disapproval of usages of “neoliberal(ism)” is your singling it out for such disapproval while freely throwing around numerous other political categorical terms (e.g., “progressive”!!!) that are, in my view, at least as amenable to sloppily careless usage, outright misuse, and even deliberate misrepresentation for propaganda purposes.
All those kinds of misuse are valid, even worthy, targets for objection, correction, disapproval, etc. The mystery to me is why usage of “neoliberal(ism)”, among dozens of other at least equally problematic political-jargon terms, seems so uniquely capable of setting you off.
My overall impression is that it is not so much the term itself, but misuse (in your perception) of it that provokes these objections. If so, I’ll repeat my earlier suggestion that explaining the nature of the specific misuse relative to the actual meaning of the term would be much more helpful (not to mention valid!) than blanket dismissal/condemnation in general of using what’s in fact a meaningful, useful, not-particularly-difficult-to-define term.
To do otherwise, imo, is to surrender to the ignorant and/or the propagandists.
How can I do as you ask?
I read someone write that Hillary is a neoliberal or that Obama is a neoliberal, and I have no idea why that is being written.
I can guess.
It’s frequently about free trade, for example. Sometimes it’s about public education.
But sometimes it’s really a vast critique of bipartisan postwar foreign policy (i.e., economic imperialism, imposition of an American set of rules, “I Was an Economic Hitman,” Smedey Butlerism, etc.).
I don’t really know what people are saying until they say it.
And it matters a lot, because it’s one thing if you don’t like Clinton because you think she’s charter schools and another if you don’t like her because she’d continue basically seventy years of bipartisan U.S. foreign/economic policy.
Are you going after her uniquely, as an individual, or are you condemning everyone and everything?
I can’t have these kinds of debates on these terms.
They just “set me off.”
the practical difficulties.
Options include:
What doesn’t seem a valid option to me is just blanket rejection/dismissal/condemnation of usages (including accurate, valid ones) of a word that does have a relatively clear and defined meaning.
(And the singling out of this one among all the analogous possibilities remains an unsolved mystery to me, too.)
Dude, I don’t have time to argue with people in every comment thread.
But if people bring neoliberalism as an empty epithet and assume people will know what they mean and agree with it, they’ll find out that I think they need to hone their arguments.
I just don’t see how blanket (as opposed to targeted) condemnation of (seemingly all) usage of “neoliberal(ism)” moves you toward your stated goal.
In case it isn’t already clear: my objection is to throwing out the baby (communication using a word with a known . . . or at least knowable, if one can be bothered! . . . meaning) with the bathwater (misuse, in all its forms, of said term).
Validly targeted objections/disapproval could be usefully clarifying.
“Meh, ‘neoliberal’!” [essentially] not so much.
We communicate (not exclusively, but to a very large degree) via words. Words have meanings. Rejection of communication attempts using the actual meanings of words because sometimes some people misuse them instead just seems to me wrong-headed and likely to impede, rather than promote, communication and understanding.
Perhaps another way to put this: it’s not clear that “what you mean by ‘neoliberal’ here is unclear, I think you need to hone your argument” would take significantly more time than your indiscriminant tantrums (sorry, but . . . ) seemingly against any/all use of the term. Jus’ sayin’.
Look, let me give you an example. Say that people came here and routinely wrote that they wouldn’t support Hillary Clinton because she’s a punter.
Well, how would I know if they meant that she is a person who gambles and makes risky investments or if they meant that she’s not a player but merely an observer or if they meant that she loves to watch porn and hire male prostitutes or if they meant that she puts off making hard decisions or if they meant that she likes to pilot long, narrow flat-bottomed boats?
I wouldn’t really know. All I’d know for sure is that they didn’t mean it in a nice way.
Half the people I encounter using neoliberal as a term, actually have no idea that it’s a term that most naturally applies to the folks behind Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies. I actually assume most people don’t know this unless I see some context that suggests that they might.
I have no way of knowing if the person is opposed to Hillary because they assume she’ll be just like Bill, or because they think she’ll want to privatize everything or because they don’t like her foreign policy or because she’s too much of the same, or what.
So, the problem isn’t that “punter” doesn’t have a known or knowable meaning. The problem is that I can’t tell what people mean by it or if they even are using the right term for what they want to be saying.
This is much less of a problem with a term like “progressive,” although I fight over that one, too, because for a lot of folks, a progressive is a white college-educated person with a social conscience, and I think progressives are primarily people of color joining with union workers and white professionals. So, what I consider progressive is informed much more heavily by what I see on black and Latino blogs and news outlets than anything that Jane Hamsher and Matt Stoller have to say.
But, still, I rarely am uncertain about how the term is meant.
You think you have a working definition of neoliberal, and that’s fine. But I think the term is primarily an insult used by wankers who read too much Naked Capitalism.
Is that not a refusal to contextualize each of their discrete actions? Do you think they are Marxists? (as an ad absurdum example)
That allows you to treat every contradiction as disproving the rule. Like Nader and Kennedy examples you quoted.
It’s probably not helpful to go around calling people Marxists.
I do think that there are Marxist influences in some progressive attacks on capital, but then I don’t think Marxism was ever 100% wrong. I mean, as a purported science it was crackpot, but it had many valid critiques of our system.
But, yeah, if your main interest in health care is destroying the insurance industry rather than saving lives, or if you’d rather break up big banks for ideological reasons than focus on credit card reform and consumer financial protection, then it’s possible that you’re more of an anticapitalist than an advocate for the needy.
For most folks, things are more nuanced than this, so they can accept solutions that are less than optimal and that don’t really further any ideological goals.
LOL You completely misread the persons I was calling Marxists. As you say, it would NOT be ad absurdum to call some critics of neoliberalism Marxists or fellow-travelers.
And then you make a haystack. Of course, I want to kill babies!! And btw, I do have a problem with banks getting Fed money @ 1% interest and charging the limit to their customers. Any movement on that? Any hope of Postal Banks? Any hope of rescinding the taxpayer backstops for casino money?
So you still think the technocrats are non-ideologues. Offends no one, does it? Well, that does explain some things.
Make that “Mock” calling Marxists
If you have a Rosetta Stone handy, maybe I will be able to respond.
LOL I think we have reached the apex of miscommunications. Later.
and I replied to it then. Since you evidently didn’t read, ignored, or dismissed the response, I’m not real motivated to search it up again.
But feel free to do so yourself!
“Would a non-neoliberal administration hugely increase the military to eliminate private contracting?”
It still comes out of the budget, and contracting inevitably costs more than having a grunt do it. The benefit of contracting is that it adds another level of deniability.
I’m not sure if I see a political difference in having more or fewer bucks going to contractors versus military except that contracting gives more opportunity for graft, but the way weapons and every other kind of military contract gets handed out, I suspect everybody’s wheel is greased. What with our bipartisan eternal war actual size difference between Dem and Repub budgets don’t seem all that much.
If that’s what you were talking about. I’m kind of concentrating on the Warriors game.
Getting around the FOI Act is indeed the spur for a lot of our contracting out of national responsibilities. Accountability can be avoided. That should not be overlooked.
From Wikipedia:
By my count, Hillary meets only one of these criteria (free trade).
I largely agree on Friedman as the face of it, if we’re talking about ’60s-to-’80s Friedman — before monetarism collapsed — rather than ’90s-to-’00s Friedman, when Friedman admitted he’d gotten a lot wrong and reverted back to more Keynesian inclinations.
Privatizing education is definitely in her wheelhouse.
Her specific proposals to “fix” SS fundamentally alter it in that direction.
She is generally a proponent of public/private solution that supply rentals to business from taxpayers to avoid capitol expenditures from govt.
Private prisons. Private utilities. Private libraries. Private companies running parking enforcement. Public goods being supplied by the market, not government.
Education is a state and local issue. As are utilities, libraries and (WTF?) parking enforcement. So that’s largely gibberish outside of some relatively unimportant bill on K-12.
But by all means, don’t write her name in for your local county council election.
Her proposal for “fixing” SS involves…taxing the wealthy more and giving people larger checks when their spouses die or they have to leave the labor force to take care of a family member. How that qualifies as altering it in the direction of privatization, I don’t know.
I agree with you on private prisons though.
I don’t know what you mean on the rentals and capex. You’ll have to be more specific.
The federal checkbook facilitates the privatization of public schools. Remember No Child Left Behind?
And they give political weight to the “Reformers” at the state/municipal level.
SS was designed to be fully egalitarian to insure it never was labeled a “poverty program” and destroyed. It has lasted 75 yrs and is our most popular piece of the safety net in ALL parties. We already have SS Supplemental Income program for the poorest. Or we could use the “Elderly CPI” to tweak benefits upwards. Thirty yrs of wage stagnation is what has weakened it. Fix that.
And Deficit Reduction is baaaaaaack.
Here in Portland, Oregon, we have light rail to our airport by dint of a public/private arrangement. Money from private sector pretty much paid for the light rail line. Private sector got development rights over some land near the airport in exchange. The sort of development we wound up with is tacky (big box stores mostly). The light rail is heavily used. Make of it whatever you wish.
Heck, our railroad system was public/private. Remember all the land that was handed out to the RR barons. Eventually their monopoly became so abusive it energized a political movement to rein them in, but they did a great service before they got cartel-ish. We had tight money then and could not bond-issue that program. So we sold federal lands.
Where the abuse of the public often occurs is when guaranteed rentals are contracted. When maintenance is not enforced. Toll roads are the poster boys.
Why waste the institutional power you have for a crapshoot at access.
Moreover, one of the roles of the Vice President is to keep the opposition praying for the President’s good health. Gore failed to do that; thus the impeachment nonsense. Nixon, Agnew, Quayle, Cheney, and Biden succeeded in doing that. Thus Hilda Solis and Thomas Perez. Johnson’s failure to do that created a Broadway play, MacBird.
And Solis and Perez will bring labor along and can make the case for a reasonable immigration policy. They both understand the labor issues involved.
Moreover, they have the incentive and the audience for revving up the Latino demographic and bringing over Latino Republicans, possibly even flipping some Congressional and legislative seats in the Amexica region.
I like both. They are younger people, too. Maybe more flexible…
I took “neoliberal” here to mean:
Neoliberalism seeks to transfer control of the economy from public to the private sector, rationalized by the narrative that it will produce a more efficient government and improve the economic health of the nation.
In terms of policy, I took it to mean the policy items of what is called the “Washington Consensus”.
I would be interested in a Clinton speech in which she explicitly stated where her ideas depart from that framework in domestic policy, policy toward developmental aid, and international economic policy.
Ideally, we should have had a debate about what constitutes a post-neoliberal progressive set of policies before and during the primaries. We should have has that from Sanders more than his marketing-oriented stick to the script introductory campaign. Had we a media that was interested in policy instead of blacking out Sanders’s campaign, it might have happened.
Maybe after the primaries are finally over we can have that discussion because it is important to setting up for 2018. Otherwise the hostile Congress continues and continues to be the perfect excuse for ever-expensive failures.
The idea that blogs can be determinative in turning out highly motivated voters for particular candidates has become a misguided on in my opinion.
In brief, non-neoliberal policies recognize infrastructure as a public responsibility with certain characteristics that improve economic performance and recognize other nations as having agency apart from US “leadership”. It sees restraint in national security policy and intelligence community operations from trying to transform other nation’s governments to conform to US business interests. And it does not assert the requirement of a global system in which the US is the unipolar power.
The Russian and Chinese development of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is the blowback from high-handed policies in the 1990s and 2000s when Russia was on its knees after the fall of the Soviet Union and the catastrophic reality checking W did on the actual power that the US possessed. That the US foreign policy establishment national security establishment is panicked is (1) a failure of their own analysis and advice to two Presidents and (2) the desire for a new budget grift. They were the ones who recommended that the US be tied down in the “Global War on Terror” for now on 15 years. They were the ones who overbought conventional weapons systems and ever more expensive high-tech weapons systems instead of working more with diplomacy when diplomacy was possible. They are the ones who addicted the GOP to their ideas about strength and saluted and went forward when Cheney went to the “Dark Side”. And they are sitting waiting and eager to be Donald Trump’s “Wehrmacht” against Russia and China.
Step one in a non-neoliberal government would be to level with the American people about our real situation in the world instead of beating the exceptional nation drum, pretending that we can work our way out of it through more miitary spending.
As for the trade agreements, sunk costs of negotiation do not justify passing irrevocably bad agreements. Especially when Europe is in chaos and Japan is facing economic challenges. And China understands clearly that the object is not trade, it is cutting China out of trade with its own nearest region.
All of the neo-liberal, government as an instrument of business, US foreign policy has become too clever by half and we are setting ourselves up for a major global disaster.
Thank you for taking this pitch. I am tired of repeating my points to someone who is not listening to me.
I’m not sure why you think progressives should avoid trying to have a role in a Clinton administration. If Clinton is a neoliberal, which I don’t dispute, then Obama is one as well. Do you deny that progressive legislation has passed in the last eight years?
People like Liz Warren are working inside the party and with Democrats that you would probably identify as neoliberals. Progressives certainly have not refused to participate in Obama’s administration so I see no reason why they would not try to influence Clinton.
It really makes no sense from a practical pov.
Has the ownership and direction of the means of production, distribution, and finance been placed in the hands of the workers?
No. Then the answer to your question is also ‘No’.
Everything else is palliative, half-measures stuff that simply postpones the glorious day.
That much should be clear by now.
We are not saying that AT ALL. We want to keep our institutional strength in Congress as strong as possible (and add to it) in order to balance the voice of neoliberalism coming from the executive.
And what if it turns out that Clinton doesn’t need the Sanders bitter-enders to win?
http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2016/06/what-if-hillary-clinton-doesnt-need.html
What is Trump is ousted in convention and Republicans unify behind a compromise candidate? As mercurial as Trump is, he might get bored and drop out when it becomes hard work.
Just how far into the Sanders supporters do you want to tag as “bitter-enders”? That is a variable range depending on how the convention goes.
Wouldn’t that leave the DNC flat-footed… Sheesh.
If Trump is ousted there’s civil war in the Republican party and an easy win for the Democrats. If Trump retired and the Republicans picked Kasich, there might be trouble, but I don’t see how they could pick anybody besides Cruz then, and if they did manage to, we’d be back in the civil war scenario.
Cruz doesn’t have a lot of party backing like Kasich, who currently is a governor and not in Washington, like Cruz. For VP, Nikki Haley, who rode in on the Tea Party wave, could soften the blow. The Repub Revolters don’t want someone who sits in DC. Besides, Cruz’s support is soft. Does any Repub really miss Cruz?
And “vast majority” doesn’t give an estimate of how many are unalterably opposed to Clinton and how many she could retain.
How many are immaterial because they do no vote in swing states… they can only hurt downballot.
That’s just the thing. Most of the “Bernie or Bust” people I see on Twitter are from safe states. Meaning their votes won’t make the difference one way or another. They live in either reliably “blue” or “red” states. So all those decrying them are really making a mountain out of a mole hill.
And the Bernie or Bust people by being from safe states have little or no leverage with their grandstanding except raising the spectre of the 2000 election, which hurts their bargaining within in the party and does nothing with regard to the outcome of the general election.
Of course, there are some non-Sanders lefties hyping the Bernie-or-Bust response as well.
And Greens, Libertarians, and even the Trump campaign trying to scoop up anti-Hillary voters.
I’m not expecting much from “Bernie or Bust”. The PUMAs made a lot of noise in 2008 but no meaningful difference in the vote.
She was going to blow off progressives no matter what happened. Unless she’s actually as progressive and trustworthy etc. etc. as HRC supporters are saying and if so then what’s the problem?
HRC told me in 2008 she didn’t need me so I’m fine with that.
She’s not going to “blow anybody off”. Like any Presidential candidate, she’ll do what she says as much as she can, and you can go to her issues page to see what that is, which is a solidly liberal program. She’s no socialist, but that’s moot as we’re not going to get anything socialist through Congress in the next 4 years.
Your last sentence pretty much lays out the problem people have with Hillary Clinton and why Bernie Sanders is attractive. Sanders has a vision that he passionately promotes at every opportunity. Hillary Clinton’s vision and words are those of a bureaucrat. Saying that Clinton is pragmatic and Sanders’ ideas are pie-in-the-sky misses the point. Lots of people are looking for a candidate to inspire them, not for a candidate who’s really talented at writing memos.
that right there is the biggest difference between campaigning and governing
That’s what establishment Democratic politicians DO. Under Obama the rich have more power than ever, leaving aside whether he acquiesced to that or not, the system grinds away in that direction.
Whether it’s Bernie’s dreams or HRC’s no we can’t, they are going to get the exact same stuff through a divided congress. The only possible way to overcome that this year (as opposed to in the future) was for Bernie’s revolution to happen so as to over whelm the system but that looks unlikely to happen.
If they’re going to accomplish the same thing, give me Bernie’s aspirations so people actually can believe in something.
According to the Associated Press she now needs a mere 60 delegates from the huge haul on Tuesday to secure the nomination.
That’s not true and you know it. The DNC even said not to count supers now. So why are you helping the AP and NBC put their thumbs on the scale?
if you’re not going to count Supers then you can’t use the 2383 number which includes them you should only use the pledged delegate number instead which would 2026
Glad to see you don’t follow/understand the rules. I just hope your candidate has a plan to keep the Senate past January 2019.
I fully understand the rules but if you’re going to disregard them you might as well be consistent about it.
“If you think of Hillary as the “limousine liberal” of this election season and The Donald as the right-wing “populist in pinstripes,” and consider how each of them shimmied their way to the top of the heap and who they had to fend off to get there, a different picture emerges. Clinton inherits the mantle of a liberalism that has hollowed out the American economy and metastasized the national security state. It has confined the remnants of any genuine egalitarianism to the attic of the Democratic Party so as to protect the vested interests of the oligarchy that runs things. That elite has no quarrel with racial and gender equality as long as they don’t damage the bottom line, which is after all the defining characteristic of the limousine liberalism Hillary champions. Trump channels the hostility generated by that neoliberal indifference to the well-being of working people and its scarcely concealed cultural contempt for heartland America into a racially inflected anti-establishmentarianism. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders targets Clintonian liberalism from the other shore. Liberalism is, in other words, besieged.”
Here’s the only valid content in that crock:
All of the rest of that crock mis-attributes to liberals the sins and crimes of neoliberals.
Gingrich or Rove, seeing that crock, would be chortling and rubbing their hands in glee over your succumbing to — and now furthering! — the success of their propaganda campaign to distort the meaning of “liberal” and thereby turn it into a pejorative. (Suggest you try running down the origin/source of, e.g., “limousine liberal”.) Why would you want to carry their water for the likes of Gingrich and Rove?
All I want to know is this: are the Virgin Islands on the list of states and territories that Don’t Count ??
Oh, you mean like caucus states?
You mean like Washington State, where Sanders grabbed most of the delegates by winning the caucuses, while Clinton won the subsequent primary with a much larger number of voters? Works for me!
Exactly why the primary process need to be reformed so it’s clear to the public where the candidate are in the media horse race.
Heh, all that shows are that Clintonistas are politically uniformed or that the campaign dropped the ball. Of course Berniecrats are not going to waste their time in a meaningless beauty contest that allocates no delegates.
If the beauty contest is a primary that shows the ability of the campaign to turn out the vote, any campaign would be wise not to split the sense of who the Democratic voters want as a nominee. Clinton learned that in 2008 in Texas, Bernie in Washington. Narrative is important.
Of course! And it looks like after tonight we can add Puerto Rico to the list.
Between the states that don’t count when Clinton wins and the states that don’t count when Sanders wins, everyone can be happy about dissing the other side.
This strikes me as bothsidesism.
Sanders folks basically decided to argue that Clinton’s pledged delegate lead shouldn’t count because she ran up huge margins in the South where Dems never win. They further argued that closed primaries were undemocratic.
Everybody else sarcastically noted that these were great points, because the Dems routinely win in places like Oklahoma, Idaho and Nebraska. And that caucuses are, of course, a beacon of democracy. And that, yes, aside from most of the key swing states, Clinton really doesn’t win anything relevant to the general election.
One side was making ridiculous arguments. The other side was largely responding by pointing out that the arguments were ridiculous.
It’s a caricature. It misstates both sides’ arguments.
Sanders has consistently pointed out that superdelegates most times do in fact take into account the pledged delegate counts at the convention and because they are informally committed, not bound, they can in fact change their vote at the convention from their commitment to a particular candidate. What that Sanders statement did was kick the Clinton campaign in the butt and get them contending for pledged candidates through increased campaigning and get-out-the-vote actions and forced out a few more debates.
Clinton has consistently argued the rules that the winning nominee is the total of both superdelegates and pledged delegates. And after the first ballot, the pledged delegates are released from their pledge commitments; this envisions a situation in which more than two candidates are still running at the time of the convention.
Both of these are valid points, but supporters have bent them to creating narratives of chicanery on both sides. Clinton, of course wants to win the majority of pledged delegates by the end of the primaries, and so does Sanders; but this is cast as illegitimate for Sanders, and every bump in election administration is assigned to Clinton campaign shenanigans. Clinton , of course, seeks to hold her superdelegate commitments, and Sanders seeks to persuade superdelegates that Clinton is a risky candidate against Trump.
I don’t know if the candidates make it personal, but a lot of their supporters do.
Meanwhile, unaffiliated social media campaigns, with different motives, muddy the waters.
It isn’t just “supporters” on the Sanders side who’ve “bent them to create narratives of chicanery”; Sanders himself has repeatedly attacked the superdelegate system (and by extension its participants) as corrupt and illegitimate. So let’s not fall into bothsiderism here.
Sanders is perfectly free to make his arguments to the superdelegates that they should throw aside both the pledged delegate and the popular vote results and coronate him instead; but excoriating people he’s done nothing for over decades as corrupt, illegitimate hacks seems rather an unproductive way to accomplish it.
Sanders has a rally today in San Diego, at Qualcomm stadium. I also had an event there, in a different parking lot. Lots of people, the ones that were cutting across our lot (I was safety steward today, so I had interactions) were certainly enthusiastic. One of them shouted for us to fuck off, so we enjoyed that.
LONG long line to get in. I mean REALLY long.
.
Hillary won by a landslide in Puerto Rico tonight, and now just 24 delegates short from the nomination. New Jersey polls close at 8PM Tuesday night and by 8PM and 15 seconds, she will have secured the nomination. Time to set up the victory party with me and about 20 Hillary supporters. Time to celebrate!!
THAT is what political ignorance produces. Puerto Ricans voting to be eaten by vulture capital.
yes calling voters stupid is the best way to win them over to your side
It is the preferred state of things, it appears. Just wait and watch.
I’m not actually a wait and watch kind of guy
in an appallingly large number of cases, it’s the truth.
Hmm, timely post today on PR.
Vulture Hedge Funds, The Race For 2016, And The Uncertain Future Of Puerto Rico
But conflict between the Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush’s public statements and their cozy relationships with the hedge funds is raising eyebrows. Kink, who just released a report detailing hedge fund involvement in Puerto Rico’s crisis, told ThinkProgress the candidates owe voters an explanation.
“Puerto Ricans and mainland voters need to demand answers from the candidates about the extent to which they’re influenced by this money,” he said. “If they’re for bankruptcy rights, they need to explain how they’ll get it through a Congress that doesn’t seem to care about regular people but cares a lot about hedge fund billionaires.”
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2015/09/04/3697677/clinton-and-bush-promise-relief-for-puerto-rico
-while-raking-in-cash-from-its-vulture-fund-creditors/
Post at 99%caucus claimed massive vote suppression through presidential primary polling stations placed at different places then polling stations for local primaries.
Sorry, no link. I am on the phone.
The Hedgies are not gonna let that banquet slip away.
Found the link. Caucus99percent linked to reddit, so here is reddit:
Puerto Rico was the biggest election fraud of all primaries: SandersForPresident
it appears that the Sanders campaign asked for fewer voting locations because they couldn’t staff the number that was used in previous primaries
That was the total for all votes cast in the presidential primary? That is crazy!
Our world revolves around corporations and profits and wealth. Government supports what business needs. It should come as no surprise that business seeks to transfer infrastructure from government to private control. So we have for profit prisons and schools and, yes, Virginia, Obamacare. And their eyes are set on Medicare and Medicaid and SS. The greed inherent in this pursuit of profit infects trade agreements and support the idea of moving jobs to lower wage paying regions. Meanwhile our minimum wage is basically now a slave wage. This world is dependent on GDP growth which drives wealth accumulation in the private sector. This structure is in turn dependent on military muscle to ensure the books are kept straight and all the peoples of the world act as expected.
Call it neoliberalism, if you like. But a funny thing seems to be happening on the way to the bank. Poverty and inequality are rampant and basic human need for health care leaves too many near bankruptcy. And school debt continues to rise where once tuition was near zero. Our roads and bridges decay. Employment is suboptimal with U6 at around 10% and this past month new job creation was disappointing. Even the stock market seems to have topped out as GDP is stagnant. Still the capitalist insanely seeks higher interest rates. Just listen to CNBC any morning.
The disatisfaction runs to someone like Bernie or Trump, not to Clinton who wants to retain the status quo with a still stronger MIC for what purpose escapes me. My sense is this really can’t be fixed with business as usual. But we can probably ignore it some more and leave Sanders outside. But this world is having problems that perhaps many have not noticed.
And every new insult is disconnected from the next. They cannot be contextualized because “neoliberal” is a banned word. Or it is claimed to be toooooooooooooooo vague and thus meaningless. How handy for them.
So you have Puerto Rico cluelessly voting to turn itself into Haiti.
Booman never said it was a banned word, just that it’s not very helpful when describing what you’re talking about since very few people agree on the definition
Obamacare is not a neoliberal policy, for the simple reason that the health care services that it provides were never provided by the public sector in the first place.
Yeah, well, profits you know as opposed to public policy. Call it neoliberalism, if you like, or not.
BooMan, before you call the upcoming “partnership” agreements free trade agreements, you need to read the very technical text. They are mercantilist agreements in which developed countries are bargaining for their most politically connected industries and insisting on developing countries have free trade an open themselves to the corporations of the developed countries. For the US, this means going to the mat for the pharmaceutical, media and IT industry on copyrights, patents, and trademarks regardless of how that diminishes the public domain, inhibits the growth of knowledge, and creates monopoly pricing. It means shoving open markets for a US agriculture and agricultural chemical industry determined to deploy genetically modified organisms to the rest of the world. It means protecting the US financial industry from regulations by other countries.
And it opens US laws, even the Affordable Care Act, to corporate suit before international tribunals as “non-tariff restraints on trade”. Arbitration in those tribunals is final. In principle overseas subsidiaries of US corporations could bring US law to these courts to overturn them on behalf of their parent company. The corporations with the best lawyers and deepest pockets win. The people of every country in the agreement lose. Unorganized and organized labor loses. The environment loses.
To call the agreements “free trade” is to engage in fraud as was done with NAFTA and the WTO.
It is the sort of agreement one would want to wish on one’s enemies.
Beyond that, the major security aspect is turning the countries in the region that are not already into arms buyers from the US defense industry based on hyping the Chinese and Russian threats. And those arms sales will be done under the rules of the agreement, which try to beat down preferences for national control over production of armaments.
These are agreements that were started by Republicans; Democrats should not be the ones foisting them on the populations of the countries in the agreement. They are another legal advancement toward corporate feudalism as the emerging global economic system. That might bring global stability, but at what cost to individuals?
From the standpoint of over 200 years after Adam Smith’s publication of The Wealth of Nations, it seems that free trade is in fact impossible without the free movement of labor. And that free trade is in fact what fuels the immigration crisis that Trump’s followers are hyping and the well-noted race-to-the-bottom of jobs and benefits in the US and even in Europe.
The giant sucking sound that Ross Perot noted was not the money going to Mexico, but the money going from worker/consumers into corporate profits, profits that now those corporations do not know how to invest because, for them, people do not matter at all. Not even shareholders. Only the mighty CEO matters.
This is the corrupt failing system that the Democratic Party now seems to want to prop up instead of mitigate.
That is not an alternative message to Trump’s at all. Well, it really is, but only at the margins. Only in the nuance, and you know how easily nuance is to sell in the US.
Thank you. That needed saying. TTIP is still on HC’s to-do list.
What a trite, deceptive cliche it has become: free trade agreements. Who could possibly be against free trade? Thanks TarheelDem. One question: on my computer your text disappears on the right behind the border. Can I rectify that or are you using another kind of layout?
Now I see that the whole thread is like that. What’s up?
“free trade”. Truly “free” trade essentially doesn’t exist above the level of individual barter, i.e., if the trade is conducted using currency(ies), which are issued, controlled, and manipulated by governments, even before other interventions such as those in (ridiculously) so-called “free trade” agreements.
(Bitcoin might qualify as an attempt to get around this, but seems to have primarily benefited — for a while anyway — drug dealers evading the need to launder cash.)
More importantly, trade agreements are not done to benefit the people of a country but the most politically powerful businesses.
For Democrats in 2016, those are Finance, Media, Silicon Valley, and Pharmaceuticals. For Republicans, they are the same plus Agribusiness and Government Contracting.
Governments are taking down bitcoin where it is vulnerable–in the exchanges with other currencies. If it is not convertible to other currencies, it cannot be used to pay taxes and finally it is only useful in an underground economy because its acceptance is limited. And since its value depends on the integrity of its conversion, it is easily used for conversion fraud for lack of a pricing mechanism viewable by all.
A helpful exercise might be to look at how bitcoin operates and use those insights into bank operations to evaluate bank integrity in the existing banking system. It is not a self-regulating institution.
Sarcastic: ‘Who can possibly be against free trade.’
sarcastic question actually underlies the marketing, I presume because, IIRC, “free trade” consistently polls quite well here, ridiculous as that is.
Polls better among Dems than Republicans, FGS!
Exactly how KMBC source this statistic is unknown, nor is the methodology.
But, let’s take this as a worst case estimate because California is probably the best state outside of Vermont for Sanders.
Deduct the proportion of those who won’t act on this statement to a pollster.
Estimate what percentage will.
Then estimate what percentage actually will cross over to Trump.
(I bet some of Yves Smith’s New York friends actually will but not because of progressivism; after all, some of them are on Wall Street. Enough to write an article about but not enough to count in New York totals.) BTW, it’s naked capitalism’s week to jump the shark.
Which means there are up to 35% of Sanders voters to solidify behind a Democratic unity campaign if the convention does its job properly.
This has kinda jumped the shark, too… Don’t see these numbers in the MSM. Sheesh. Or do you contest them?
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Screen-shot-2016-06-06-at-8.17.24-AM-624×6
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The original source with links…https:/www.nerdwallet.com/blog/finance/why-people-are-angry