IMO Trump

If the election is even remotely on the level, Trump will get crushed. He and Clinton were the two most disliked candidates in the modern era, and Trump “won” with only 26% of the potential vote. HRC had 28%.

Clinton’s not running. She was pretty much the only Dem Trump could beat, and he still needed help from Comey, especially, to do that. I don’t see a similar scenario this time, and Trump’s negatives have gotten even worse while in office. Racism, kids in cages, the destruction of the environment, endless lies, endless grifting and self-dealing.

Plus, he can no longer run against the establishment. He is the establishment. And he can no longer run as the swamp drainer. He is the swamp. He’s made it a thousand times worse.

Prior to the 2016 election, voters didn’t know he was under investigation for collusion with Russia. Now they know he colluded, lied about it, obstructed justice, and continued to seek help from other nations like Ukraine. And unlike the Mueller investigation, which took two years and was pretty much silent, the Ukraine scandal is already public, and the public hearings haven’t even started.

He’s toast. His only chance is to cheat on an international level, without exposure, and I have no doubt he’ll do his damndest in that realm. But too many people have had enough of him and are speaking out. Including insiders, in his own administration.

IMO, the Dems are going to have to work really, really hard to blow this. It’s theirs to win. They should be able to destroy him. If they can’t, they need to find other occupations.

waterfield wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Run on climate change, economic equality, an end to war, mass incarceration and the surveillance state (public and private). Run on peace, justice and ice cream for breakfast, and they’ve got it!

Billy: I hate to sound so cynical (its my very worst quality) but do you really think people today-right here in River City-actually care about these things-as opposed to whats in their own little lives and self interest ?

The great thing about leftist proposals? They deal with the Big Picture and individual concerns. Both/and. Centrist to conservative proposals don’t. They ignore the Big Picture, and when they deal with individual concerns, they focus almost entirely on rich people. By definition, that leaves the vast majority of voters out.

You live in a state overwhelmed by fires right now. That’s primarily a result of climate change and a failure to deal with it. Dealing with economic inequality means helping the vast majority of voters with their everyday, kitchen-table issues, instead of the desires of the rich. An end to war means an end to early death for those same voters, and it means money can go to their direct concerns, none of which are helped via war.

Etc. etc.

Only the left offers huge improvements to the quality of life for all citizens. Only the left has that tradition. Not the center and certainly not the right.

The above, of course, is my own two cents. My take on the way of things. Others may well disagree.

Hope all is well, W.

• This reply was modified 5 years ago by Billy_T.

Billy_T wrote:

The great thing about leftist proposals? They deal with the Big Picture and individual concerns. Both/and. Centrist to conservative proposals don’t. They ignore the Big Picture, and when they deal with individual concerns, they focus almost entirely on rich people. By definition, that leaves the vast majority of voters out.

Leftist proposals are great, but they are difficult to accomplish. Conservative proposals, on the other hand, are simpler: take care of yourself and everything will be fine.

For example, take k-12 public education. The left’s vision for education has created a system in my state where public schools try to educate almost everyone so that they are capable of having a 21st century job. (At least this is the type of education that Obama style democrats have created, which I know are often far different than the left policies on this board).

Trying to meet the needs of everyone has created a monster.

School systems spend millions of dollars trying to take kids from dirt poor environments where no one actually gives a damn about education and give them a college education.

As far as I can tell, the proposals from the left would just sink more money into these goals. And a lot of that money gets spent on attempts to take make sure kids who have serious problems–behavioral, learning disabilities, or kids who don’t speak English–get a quality education.

Meanwhile, middle class parents who actually care about their child’s education are stuck sending their kids to schools with kids who can’t behave because of some quixotic goal that everyone should be ready for the jobs of the 21st century.

It’s a noble goal to provide a quality education for everyone. But it’s hard as hell to accomplish. And messy.

As a parent, I don’t want my children to sit in a classroom with a 14 year old who is expected to follow school rules when that 14 year old will not even follow regular laws.

At least half the parents, and these are middle class people, I know feel the same way and send their kids to private school to avoid the mess of public schools.

Immigration is the same thing. The left wants to provide poor people from Mexico and Central America to the American dream when we the poor in America are living in misery?

Add to that, we have a near total failure to run our lifestyle on energy that won’t continue to pollute the earth and fuel climate change.

Yet, we’re going to take millions more poor and oppressed people and give them access to the modern American consumer lifestyle that demands massive amounts of energy??

The problem is that the left has ambitious goals but they’re hard, if not impossible, to accomplish.

The conservative or centrist argument is appealing sometimes because it’s just more realistic.

Billy_T wrote:

Your point about pollution and climate change and lifestyle is correct. But the answer can’t be to turn America into a Fortress and shut out the oppressed. Anyone who has a moral compass has to say no to that, especially when it’s the US that did most of the original damage to the environment, and spread the gospel of market fundamentalism around the world, which radically accelerates that damage. Capitalism itself is the major cause of pollution, waste and climate change. No other economic system in history was ever so destructive of the planet. It strikes me as obscenely immoral for us to be the Evangel of Capitalism, to get rich and fat off its rapaciousness, and then to tell the rest of the world, you’re on your own.

As a father of 3 young children, I disagree. Why should my children have to raise their kids in a shitty world because the Greatest Generation lacked the critically thinking skills to understand what they were doing to the earth?

Changes need to be made NOW. And that starts with everybody being more conscious of their carbon footprints. Allowing immigrants to continue to flood into this country so that they can live like the rest of America hinders our ability to move toward zero carbon emissions.

Continuing to spew CO2 and other junk into the air just kicks the can down the road for the next generation. It’s not like there’s a question about the science here. Future generations WILL struggle and die because of this problem.

This is one of the essays in Naomi Klein’s new book, and it’s spot on in my view. She updates it a bit in her notes.

https://www.thenation.com/article/capitalism-vs-climate/

Excerpt:

The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover—we are doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil and to biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.

So in a way, Chris Horner was right when he told his fellow Heartlanders that climate change isn’t “the issue.” In fact, it isn’t an issue at all. Climate change is a message, one that is telling us that many of our culture’s most cherished ideas are no longer viable. These are profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of progress, unaccustomed to having our ambitions confined by natural boundaries. And this is true for the statist left as well as the neoliberal right.

While Heartlanders like to invoke the specter of communism to terrify Americans about climate action (Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a Heartland conference favorite, says that attempts to prevent global warming are akin to “the ambitions of communist central planners to control the entire society”), the reality is that Soviet-era state socialism was a disaster for the climate. It devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as capitalism, and spewed waste just as recklessly: before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czechs and Russians had even higher carbon footprints per capita than their counterparts in Britain, Canada and Australia. And while some point to the dizzying expansion of China’s renewable energy programs to argue that only centrally controlled regimes can get the green job done, China’s command-and-control economy continues to be harnessed to wage an all-out war with nature, through massively disruptive mega-dams, superhighways and extraction-based energy projects, particularly coal.

It is true that responding to the climate threat requires strong government action at all levels. But real climate solutions are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.

Here is where the Heartlanders have good reason to be afraid: arriving at these new systems is going to require shredding the free-market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three decades. What follows is a quick-and-dirty look at what a serious climate agenda would mean in the following six arenas: public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption and taxation. For hard-right ideologues like those gathered at the Heartland conference, the results are nothing short of intellectually cataclysmic.

Cal wrote:

wants to provide poor people from Mexico and Central America to the American dream when we the poor in America

I’m not sure allowing poor immigrants into the country will drastically increase net CO2 emissions. They’re not going to be driving Hummers to their Madison Avenue offices as soon as they cross the border. They’re still going to be poor. But now they will be able to find a job that allows them
to send a little money home to their families. Who knows, millions of immigrants working in farm fields might even reduce net CO2. It allows the work to be done by hand instead of using gas burning machinery.

You are right that we need to drastically reduce CO2 emissions now. But keep in mind, it’s the conservatives who want to maintain the status quo. Their plan isn’t realistic. Just the opposite. It completely dismisses the reality of climate change.

Of course, the other problem with that tact is this:

There is no proof that immigrant children are tougher to handle in the classroom than the so-called “native born.” There is also no proof that poor kids are tougher to handle than rich kids, or middle class kids. There is no proof that immigrant kids, or poor kids in general, are more “disruptive.”

So if American parents are upset that their kids have to go to schools with disruptive, unruly children, however one might define that, they’re not going to be able to solve that by kicking out the children of immigrants or the poor in general. Putting up walls, building moats, filling them with snakes and alligators — as Trump said he wants to do — isn’t going to solve anything . . . and that policy will kill tens of thousands of our fellow humans in the near term, and potentially millions, given the trajectory of climate change.

Cal,

I’m guessing you already know this, but I think it’s an important clarification.

When conservatives talk about “the left” being at fault for every problem in society, they’re absolutely wrong on a myriad of levels. To begin with, “the left” doesn’t hold power anywhere in America. The center, to center-right dominates. Yes, you have a scattering of center-left individuals, working along side people to their right, with and even smaller scattering of leftists, but I can’t think of a single city or metro area in the nation that is actually run, from the top, by “liberals,” much less leftists.

Leftists are (generally) decidedly to the left of liberal on the political spectrum. You could probably count the number of actual leftists in DC on two hands at present . . . and that’s mostly because of the election of 2018.

So, with that out of the way . . . .

The idea of offering more and more testing isn’t leftist. It’s centrist to conservative. Leftists are egalitarians and small “d” democrats, so if we had our druthers, you wouldn’t have poor kids in the first place, and you definitely wouldn’t have a hierarchy of schools, from rotten to excellent. We’d do everything in our power to make them all excellent . . . and, yes, that would take a radical increase in funding . . . but not to add more testing, and not to try to prepare them to be cogs in the capitalist machine.

There wouldn’t be any capitalist machine any longer, so our rationale for school would be to prepare all kids to reach their fullest potential in life, to be as knowledgeable as possible about the world . . . not so they can get great corporate jobs, but so they live the fullest lives possible, and in a sustainable way, given the natural limits of this planet.

That’s my take, anyway. Hope all is well, Cal.