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Interesting. So in a nation with an extremely high rate of unemployment, talking about the good ole USA here, you say-
Trump wouldn’t have a problem with rich foreigners coming to this country since they can pay their way and can create and finance jobs for other US citizens?
WELL DUH! It’s about the ECONOMY! JOBS. JOBS. JOBS. JOBS.
Actually, our rate of unemployment is rather low (4.7%), if we’re comparing apples with apples, and not using a different metric for the past than we use today. It’s pretty low. Though this is also a bit of a scam, foisted upon us by capitalists in general and the Fed in particular, who consider anything under 5% “full employment.” Of course, “full employment” would be 0% unemployment, not some number under 5%. But that’s another story and it has to do with capitalism’s desire for a standing army of the unemployed, at all times, to kill worker leverage and keep wages down. And that has absolutely nothing to do with refugees and immigrants.
But, again, you keep talking about jobs jobs jobs. And I keep asking you to post Trump’s plan for creating them. He doesn’t have one. He’s never put forward any plan to create them. All he does is demagogue about black and brown people, immigrants, refugees, undocumented workers, etc. who don’t impact our wages one iota or take away our jobs. Corporations, the rich and the capitalist system itself do that.
Bnw, can you please post Trump’s plan for “creating jobs”? I’ve asked several times now.
I’m still waiting for the first expression of an actual policy from Trump. He’s never presented one. On any subject. With him, it’s all word salad and repetition of the same old same old tired xenophobic rants.
What would he actually do about jobs, shit wages, crappy conditions for workers? What, exactly, has he proposed? Cuz just saying he’ll “renegotiate” trade deals is meaningless. What will go in them? And will he continue the pattern of letting financial and business elites write them — which really means writing endless loopholes for American businesses to slip through and screw over American workers and workers in all trade zones.
Trump has no history of doing anything for labor, and no specific plans to bring jobs home. Anyone who thinks that it’s all the fault of black and brown immigrants and refugees obviously doesn’t have a clue about how the economy works, who pulls the strings, who sets up winners and losers and why.
When America sets up trade deals, it does so to protect the wealthy, to protect profits for rich executives and their corporations. It does this and destroys labor leverage and all smaller and weaker competitors in its wake. That’s not on immigrants and refugees. That’s on people like Trump.
What will he do to stop himself and people like him from screwing over American workers and workers all over the globe?
Oh, for chrissakes. He has said that the Mexicans coming here are the worst society has to offer. “When Mexico sends you its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
Never mind that Mexico isn’t “sending” anybody, that statement is appalling, and there is no way to get out of the fact that it is racist. And inflammatory.
What he said above should have been enough to disqualify him. All by itself. But he’s added to that pile of excrement since then. Just today, he was still saying we can’t let any Syrians in the country, because we don’t know where they come from — more Palinesque word salad — and that people were flooding over the border. They aren’t. It wasn’t that long ago that he insisted that “thousands of Muslims cheered in New Jersey on 9/11.” That, also, all by itself, should have been enough to sink his candidacy. But he’s the ultimate teflon racist and xenophobe, and his supporters continue to make endless excuses for his dangerous and incendiary behavior.
It’s not an accident that he has a large white supremacist following, or that he seems to retweet things from their websites all too often.
Though, really, when all is said and done, it doesn’t matter if Trump himself is a racist or not: He is obviously trying his best to appeal to them, to stoke the fires of racism and bigotry and xenophobia in America, to gin up white fears of black and brown people and bring out the ugliest side this country can present to the world. And remaining silent about this is obviously wrong as well. To play nice with Trump and his supporters is playing nice with racism, bigotry and xenophobia.
Why should we? Seriously? What should anyone feel the necessity to treat Trump as anything other than a con-artist and a dangerous bigot?
Well, even if one enters the reality-tunnel of that writer, and even if one tries to find some logic in his article, it doesn’t demonstrate that Trump is not a racist. I mean, for example, one could love Jews and still be anti-muslim, right?
Also this: “…the American Left was on-record supporting slavery, segregation, lynching and, as noted by historians…”
Linking the so-called ‘left’ to slavery and lynching is kinda meaningless because it lacks any context. I mean in the 1850’s you had all kinds of mainstream people supporting slavery. It wasn’t a ‘left vs right’ thing. And in the 1910’s and 20’s you had plenty of Dems and plenty of Reps supporting lynching of minorities. It wasn’t a ‘left vs right’ thing. It was an American thing.
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vNow now lets just drag that timeline forward 100 years since the democrats were flagrantly racist in the 1950s too. Sen. Byrd wasn’t alone in your state.
But that’s not “the left.” Will you at least admit that Jeffrey Lord is wildly mistaken in asserting that the KKK was a “leftist” organization, and that the Nazis were? We can at least agree there, correct?
Again, there is a huge difference between the Democratic Party and “the left.” They’re not the same things. And, again, historically, the Dems had all kinds of far-right congresscritters, generally in the South (pre-1965), just as the GOP once had folks on the center-left. No longer, of course. They’ve all but purged themselves of the center-right these days. With the rise of the tea party, they’re dominated by folks to the right of the center right.
And speaking of anti-semitism:
Trump recently sent out this ad about Clinton:
(The second one was a change from the first, after he was called on the obvious reference to Jews and money)
Even fellow right-winger Gary Johnson called it racist.
Trump comments ‘clearly’ racist, says Gary Johnson amid antisemitism furor
The Libertarian candidate for president, Gary Johnson, said on Sunday Donald Trump’s recent comments were “clearly” racist, a day after the presumptive Republican nominee faced accusations of antisemitism and in the same week that he said he would consider firing government employees who wear hijabs.
“He has said 100 things that would disqualify anyone else from running for president but it doesn’t seem to affect him,” Johnson told CNN’s State of the Union. “The stuff he’s saying is just incendiary. It’s racist.”
Earlier this week, a New Hampshire woman asked Trump at one of his rallies whether, as president, he would replace Transportation Security Administration workers who wear “heebeejabbies” – apparently a reference to Muslim headscarves called hijabs.
“We are looking at that,” Trump replied. “We’re looking at a lot of things.”
At the same rally, Trump pointed to a plane flying overhead and declared: “That could be a Mexican plane up there. They’re getting ready to attack.”
Well, the thing about these fantasy worlds is progress is never made no matter how many eons pass. It’s certainly true of Tolkien’s world and of George R Martin’s. Developmentally from a technological, political and cultural standpoint, the worlds are stagnant – stuck in a continuous midieval rut. So newer, more enlightened forms of government never develop. If you moved through time on one of these worlds everything would be the same no matter how far back or how far forward in time you traveled. So don’t expect anyone to come along with any new fangled ideas about democracy or the redistribution of wealth and power.
In my latest novel — which is almost ready to go — I have characters discussing this, but with regard to our Super Hero stories. Comic Books have these amazingly powerful “heroes,” but they never really change ultimate realities. They don’t go after “systems” of oppression, for instance. They don’t solve problems like inequality, hunger, the concentrations of extreme wealth, power, privilege and access. They don’t seem to worry about the absence of democracy. Instead, they defeat certain villains, even all-powerful villains from other worlds . . . . but our status quo ante lives on.
Perhaps this is because so many comic book authors are propertarians, ideologically. That’s just a guess of mine. I have zero proof. But you’ll notice how often the “good guys” are lone billionaires, and it’s either explicit or implicit that no one but the super-rich has the means to fight “evil.” But, again, what does the world look like after they’ve done this?
How many comic book heroes actually fight for greater equality, democracy, the environment, etc. etc.? How many fight to topple wealth, privilege, hierarchies and so on?
The thinking is, which goes back at least to Locke’s, that land that has not been “improved” — as in, made profitable — doesn’t really belong to anyone — yet. It belongs to the first person who makes it profitable. And it’s somehow righteous to take that land away from people or tribes or a nation that doesn’t try to “improve” it. It’s righteous to demand that it be handed over to virtuous men and women who will turn it into profit, through development and/or exchange.
If it’s just sitting there, for all Americans to, you know, look at and enjoy, then no one really owns it and it’s ripe for the taking. Because nothing has any “value” if it can’t yield profits or be sold for profits — or both.
A truly destructive mindset, and one that the American ruling class has perfected, based on the English ruling class’s model, primarily.
What the conceal-carry folks don’t ever want people to know is this: The vast majority of the time that someone pulls a gun in “self-defense,” there never would have been any escalation into deadly violence in the first place if not for guns.
99 times out of 100, you’d get a scuffle, a fist-fight, then everyone goes home, alive. Sore, perhaps, with bloody lips. But they get to go home and live to fight another day.
Conceal carry culture, however, says, no to all of that. It says, “Let’s skip the fist-fights and just go straight to DEFCON 1 and kill each other.”
This is what happened with Tayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. If no gun, they both go home alive. Zimmerman goes home after getting his butt kicked by a sixteen-year-old, and that sixteen-year-old gets to live to go to his prom, graduate, maybe go on to college, get married and so on. But because Zimmerman had a gun, he doesn’t. He’s dead.
I was a bouncer when young. I broke up numerous drunken brawls. Today, now that 50 states have conceal carry, and some even allow guns in bars, those brawls may soon become a thing of the past. Quaint, even. Folks won’t throw fists at each other. They’ll just go straight to semi-automatics and gun each other down.
It’s time to radically reverse all of the deadly business of the gun cultists and the gun industry they work for. All of it.
ZN,
Your plant with the big bad teeth pic bothered me a great deal. If I had some power here, I would have accidentally obliterated that thread, just to get rid of that pic. I vote for no more human-eating plant pics, regardless, and I think I’m going to start a social justice campaign just to make sure you don’t do it again. Kinda like this one:
Nittany,
From your description of his stance versus people like Dawkins, whom I’ve read (The God Delusion), I’d side with Myers. Atheism should definitely be a part of the “social justice” movement, and embrace feminism and be against Islamophobia, etc. Seems like a slam dunk to me.
