zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

And that’s the very definition of hypocrisy. It’s rank, slam dunk, obvious hypocrisy of the worst kind.

You mean Trump’s hypocrisy, right?

Yes. Absolutely.

— X — wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

That’s cool. I do love good food. And my long-time dream was to have a thousand acres of my own, grow all of my own food, have a coupla lakes and streams for fish and fowl, maybe breed rabbits too as a meat substitute. I’d have giant greenhouses as well, fill them up with every exotic fruit, plant and herb. Would do my best to make sure I never had to go to a grocery store for anything. Everything home grown and fresher than fresh.

Also dreamed of having work shops for wood and metal. Make my own tools and musical instruments. The whole 19th century deal.

Simplify, get back to the earth, get back to basics. End my dependence on corporations, etc. etc.

Well that sounds awesome. I had a similar dream for a while, but not about the non-meat rabbits. *razz

We did pick up 5 acres in Western NC with a steam in the back in a town that is almost entirely chain free with the exception of two lower-end grocery stores and a gas station. Lots of small independent shops, health food stores, soap and candle makers, an actual cobbler, a taco truck, and within 5 miles of a farmers market. We eat a lot of Quorn products too as a real meat substitute. If you haven’t tried it, I recommend it. Especially the Quorn burgers. Almost identical in taste to a real hamburger with the right seasonings and cooking temp. [review here]

That sounds great. I wish we could go back to our pre-capitalist past in America. Capitalism wasn’t dominant here until after the Civil War. Prior to that, most people worked for themselves, were their own bosses, had small farms, were artisans, craftsmen, etc. etc. Capitalism crushed the life out of that and forced people to go to work for others instead. Made them dependent on “suits” hundreds or thousands of miles away. I despise our current economic model and see it as obscenely immoral — just in case you haven’t gathered that by now.

;>)

Also: I got my second undergrad degree in Boone. Went back there last year, though, and it’s grown waaay too fast and is hopelessly congested now. It’s supposed to be a “small town” but it’s starting to feel like a mini-city instead, and there’s just no room there for that. I don’t like the change.

bnw wrote:

He needs people that can navigate the DC swamp. Lets see his policy initiatives in play before condemning him.

That’s excusing and rationalizing everything he and his supporters condemned during the election. Now that he’s in, it’s apparently okay to be everything they condemned in their opponents. That’s excusing “crony capitalism” and “pay to play” now because it’s Trump and Republicans doing it.

And that’s the very definition of hypocrisy. It’s rank, slam dunk, obvious hypocrisy of the worst kind.

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Billy_T.

Hram wrote:

Yep

And we may start on a wall but perhaps not right away and maybe not get too much of it done and perhaps Mexico won’t to pay for it. And maybe there are parts of Obama care that are decent so we should revise it instead of throw it out right away. And Hillary is a good person who should be thanked so they’re probably will not be an indictment. And, and, and.

It is not unusual for an incoming president to not push with fervor and also to face some realities, which they most likely knew ahead of time, on what could be enacted and not be able to push some (or more than some) of the agenda they promised.

It is unusual for the promises to be so angry and full of vitriol and the backing away to happen this quickly.

I wonder if we will ever see his tax returns…

The WaPo has an article about that today:

Trump and advisers hedge on major pledges, including Obamacare and the wall

— X — wrote:

Is that a balsamic reduction on those pancakes?
Because that just sounds awful.

I don’t even know. I’m not a “foodie.” But I did stay at Holiday Inn Express once.

I have a collection of dozens of his songs. Brilliant writer, poet, novelist and musician. Interesting too the way his voice aged, became so much deeper and more resonant.

Like Dylan, covers of his songs are often as good as his own. Here and there, even better.

Like this one:

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

in a few months, they will be ruled by a less-than-desirable leader. One which, the world will be quick to mention, was actually chosen by Americans and not imposed on them by occupation or intervention.

Reminds me of the old joke.

Why will there never be a coup leading to an imposed dictatorship in the USA?

Because there’s no American embassy there.

.

That’s a good one.

But have we really been “coup-free”? One could argue it happened in 2000. One could also argue that the GOP’s prevention of hearings to replace a dead Supreme Court justice, after that Court’s majority had gutting voting rights, which made mass voter suppression possible, is pretty close to a “coup.”

One could also argue that an FBI faction, leaking docs harmful to just one candidate, and not the other, along with Wikileaks and Russia doing the same . . . . Well, it at least has some of the elements.

The likely reason why those of us on the left don’t “go there” in this case is because we see the existing state apparatus as too similar to the one replacing part of it via the election. It’s not like we had this really awesome, “people first” governance, crushed by a right-wing revolt. We had a donor-class lovin’, center-right tilting, corporatist borgified, soft-neoliberal rule replaced by a more aggressive version of all of that . . . . with heightened bigotry, proudly anti-science and know-nothingism thrown in to sweeten the pot.

In short, while there is “contrast,” perhaps it’s not enough to make people think “coup”?

Neoliberalism Is a Political Project David Harvey on what neoliberalism actually is — and why the concept matters. by David Harvey

Excerpt (interview with David Harvey, from Jacobin):

Neoliberalism is a widely used term today. However, it is often unclear what people refer to when they use it. In its most systematic usage it might refer to a theory, a set of ideas, a political strategy, or a historical period. Could you begin by explaining how you understand neoliberalism?

I’ve always treated neoliberalism as a political project carried out by the corporate capitalist class as they felt intensely threatened both politically and economically towards the end of the 1960s into the 1970s. They desperately wanted to launch a political project that would curb the power of labor.

In many respects the project was a counterrevolutionary project. It would nip in the bud what, at that time, were revolutionary movements in much of the developing world — Mozambique, Angola, China etc. — but also a rising tide of communist influences in countries like Italy and France and, to a lesser degree, the threat of a revival of that in Spain.

Even in the United States, trade unions had produced a Democratic Congress that was quite radical in its intent. In the early 1970s they, along with other social movements, forced a slew of reforms and reformist initiatives which were anti-corporate: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, consumer protections, and a whole set of things around empowering labor even more than it had been empowered before.

So in that situation there was, in effect, a global threat to the power of the corporate capitalist class and therefore the question was, “What to do?”. The ruling class wasn’t omniscient but they recognized that there were a number of fronts on which they had to struggle: the ideological front, the political front, and above all they had to struggle to curb the power of labor by whatever means possible. Out of this there emerged a political project which I would call neoliberalism.

Can you talk a bit about the ideological and political fronts and the attacks on labor?

The ideological front amounted to following the advice of a guy named Lewis Powell. He wrote a memo saying that things had gone too far, that capital needed a collective project. The memo helped mobilize the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.

Ideas were also important to the ideological front. The judgement at that time was that universities were impossible to organize because the student movement was too strong and the faculty too liberal-minded, so they set up all of these think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Ohlin Foundation. These think tanks brought in the ideas of Freidrich Hayek and Milton Friedman and supply-side economics.

The idea was to have these think tanks do serious research and some of them did — for instance, the National Bureau of Economic Research was a privately funded institution that did extremely good and thorough research. This research would then be published independently and it would influence the press and bit by bit it would surround and infiltrate the universities.

This process took a long time. I think now we’ve reached a point where you don’t need something like the Heritage Foundation anymore. Universities have pretty much been taken over by the neoliberal projects surrounding them.

With respect to labor, the challenge was to make domestic labor competitive with global labor. One way was to open up immigration. In the 1960s, for example, Germans were importing Turkish labor, the French Maghrebian labor, the British colonial labor. But this created a great deal of dissatisfaction and unrest.

Instead they chose the other way — to take capital to where the low-wage labor forces were. But for globalization to work you had to reduce tariffs and empower finance capital, because finance capital is the most mobile form of capital. So finance capital and things like floating currencies became critical to curbing labor.

At the same time, ideological projects to privatize and deregulate created unemployment. So, unemployment at home and offshoring taking the jobs abroad, and a third component: technological change, deindustrialization through automation and robotization. That was the strategy to squash labor.

It was an ideological assault but also an economic assault. To me this is what neoliberalism was about: it was that political project, and I think the bourgeoisie or the corporate capitalist class put it into motion bit by bit.

I don’t think they started out by reading Hayek or anything, I think they just intuitively said, “We gotta crush labor, how do we do it?” And they found that there was a legitimizing theory out there, which would support that.