This poll is, of course, way too soon to matter all that much, but given the likelihood that the economy will be worse in 2020 than it is now, it may well hold:

https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=3638

Quinnipiac

August 28, 2019 – All Top Dems Beat Trump As Voters’ Economic Outlook Dims Quinnipiac University Poll Finds; Dem Primary Stays Stable With Biden Holding The Lead

Trend Information
Sample and Methodology detail

If the 2020 presidential election were held today, 54 percent of registered voters say that they would vote for former Vice President Joe Biden, while only 38 percent would vote for President Trump. Matchups against other top Democrats show:

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders topping Trump 53 – 39 percent;
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren ahead of Trump 52 – 40 percent;
California Sen. Kamala Harris beating Trump 51 – 40 percent;
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg leading with 49 percent to Trump’s 40 percent.

Looking at all of the matchups, President Trump is stuck between 38 and 40 percent of the vote. These low numbers may partly be explained by a lack of support among white women, a key voting bloc that voted for Trump in the 2016 election. Today, white women go for the Democratic candidate by double digits in every scenario. Though it is a long 14 months until Election Day, Trump’s vulnerability among this important voting group does not bode well for him.

Biden isn’t the only candidate who can defeat Trump, by any means.

zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

“It’s okay that Joey beat the hell out of Johnny, because Johnny’s family did similar things in the past. It would be hypocritical of us to punish Joey under those circumstances.”

Not only does this bring in that “two wrongs don’t make a right” thing. It’s also never about the people who actually did the dirty deeds in the past suffering. It’s us who suffer, when leaders like Trump aren’t held to account. It doesn’t somehow right the wrongs of the past committed by others . . . and, ironically, Trump himself has and is engaging in “election meddling” oversees as we speak, and tried to overthrow the government of Venezuela.

Plus people like us have always spoken against american interference abroad.

We’re not the ones who did it, and we protest it.

How that is supposed to lead to us not caring when it happens TO us is kind of beyond me.

.

You put that well. Succinctly, unlike moi.

The American tradition of election interference abroad, and worse . . . . that isn’t going to be stopped by saying what Russia (and Trump) did doesn’t matter, or by laughing it off, or by mocking the people who do care about it.

If anything, it will empower more of it from all sides. And, as you say, the upshot is that the American people suffer, not the folks who engage(d) in the meddling in the first place. It’s never, ever going to sync up as as a matter of “justice fulfilled.”

Hope all well is well . . .

• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by Billy_T.

zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

(Will break up a coupla posts to run through this, and will try to be brief)

No need for brevity. Expound at will.

Frankly I am baffled by the left critique which says Russian interference is just a mainstream dem ploy.

Well 2 things. (1) Yes the mainstream dems manipulate this. And (2) that;s irrelevant to the real story. It doesn’t boil down to “you side with the dems on this or dismiss the issue.”

…

True. That’s a ton of it. I can’t stand the Dems or the GOP. I wish they’d both go away. So this isn’t about the Dems for me, and I suspect, for a lot of other leftists. This is about — again, for me — a dangerous precedent being set at the very least. That it’s now perfectly okay for foreign governments to do whatever they can to pick our winners for us, and that their favored candidates will gladly accept that help, lie about it, obstruct justice, etc. etc.

It also makes zero sense to me when people say worse things happen domestically, by the Kochs and so on. So the answer is to double and triple down on the clandestine cheating and manipulation? The response we want is to say it’s fine to add even more BS to the pile, because we do it to ourselves already?

That view isn’t too far away from flat out nihilism in my book. “It’s all crap. So let’s not make a big deal about adding more crap.”

I find the entire thing bordering on madness, really. And it doesn’t matter which party does it. Anyone engaged in this shit, regardless of party, should be held to account. Laughing away the whole thing is just Nero playing the lyre, IMO.

And I’m still confused about what Wolff and others are trying to say. There’s far too much mockery involved, generally, to really figure that out, especially with folks like Dore. Are they saying Russia didn’t meddle? Or that it doesn’t matter? Are they saying it doesn’t matter because we do it too? Yeah, our government is guilty of that, and we’re generally worse about it. But the old saw “two wrongs don’t make a right” applies, and even that misses the main point:

It’s not that Russia meddled per se. It’s that an American candidate willingly took the help, chased after it, exploited it, covered it up, lied about it repeatedly, and then obstructed justice (at least 10 times) to stave off an investigation. Yes, empires are gonna do their spy versus spy BS. But that shouldn’t mean we’re just fine with American politicians taking advantage of this in order to cheat their way into the White House. A sane society says that’s unacceptable, and it holds those people to account, regardless of party.

Again, I’m just continually baffled as to why any public leftist would dismiss what happened, and I don’t get how they can’t see that their dismissal helps Trump and the far right.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by Billy_T.

I’ve admired Wolff for some time, and think of him as among the finest Marxian economists and communicators out there. But on the subject of Russiagate, it’s clear to me he has a major blind spot — similar to Mate’s, Greenwald’s and Dore’s, among others.

(Will break up a coupla posts to run through this, and will try to be brief)

Just in case what I’ve said comes across as waaay too cynical and manipulative.

I’m saying that Americans have been sold truly horrifically bad shit since Day One. Mostly via those stories, marketing, etc. etc. Very little “good stuff.” Almost always shit. And it’s had a tremendously ugly cumulative effect. It’s also been coupled with stories, marketing, etc. etc. telling Americans that really great ideas (socialism, real democracy, egalitarian systems, social rights, human rights, environmentalism, civil rights, the end of war and empire, etc. etc), that would be fantastic for us and the planet, are “dangerous,” “anti-American,” blah blah blah.

It’s all fiction. None of it is true. Not the sales job to push through terrible policies — wars, genocide of indigenous peoples, coups, environmental destruction, etc. etc. — or the lies and demonization of the really good stuff that would make lives better for everyone.

So when I say we need to counter those fictions with our own stories, effective sales teams and unified fronts . . . I’m not saying that we engage in “manipulation” via lies. We don’t have to. We can tell the absolute truth, unlike our enemies. They can’t tell the truth if they want to win. We can.

But without truly compelling narratives, narrators and unified fronts, we’re not going to be able to defeat their lies and demonization. We won’t defeat them simply with “the truth.” We need to make the truth “sizzle,” relentlessly, and with, as the young kids used to say, mad skilz.

Zooey wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Elections aren’t about policy. Which means you can’t be “too far left” on those. If elections were about policy, the GOP would never win a single national election, because their policies are forever unpopular. Trump never described his. He won anyway.

Elections are all about “stories,” sales teams and united fronts. The side that tells the best stories, sells them, and keeps a united, confident front, wins.

I agree with that entire post, not just the part I copied here for emphasis.

This is what I have been saying. The Dems need to sell the Green New Deal as a job and wage-building investment that will lead to the coolest hi-tech world you can possibly imagine…while saving the planet from climate change.

They can sell that vision.

The “pragmatic” Baby Steps approach Biden et al offer is not going to get people out to vote.

The essential thing about that three-legged chair is this: A great “story,” told by a great salesperson, backed by a unrelenting sales team, inspires people to vote who would normally stay home. In 2016, roughly 105 million Americans did just that.

So, not only does this approach work on the fence-sitters . . . it gets out the base and expands it. The highest percentage possible. And because the Dems’ base is bigger than the GOP’s, the Dems win that kind of election. The reason the GOP wins, more often than not, is that its strategy of telling those stories (without any talk about actual policy), and selling them really, really well, maximizes their base . . . while the Dems seem to counter with wonky stiffs and no unified party front.

“Centrists” are boring. They inspire no one. Moderates are boring. They inspire no one — except for the donor-class, whose total votes aren’t enough to matter.

Yes. The Green New Deal is a great way to “get out the vote,” and it’s excellent policy too. Ironically, it’s a thousand times better for those “blue collar” voters than anything Biden would do, and X times a thousand times better than Trump.

Tax cuts have to be paid back, eventually. And since rich people write our tax laws, and always, without exception, receive the vast majority of those tax cuts and won’t give that money back . . . . guess who ends up paying for them?

We do. The average Joe and Jane.

Rich Americans and corporations have seen massive reductions in their taxes, almost non-stop, since 1965, when LBJ lowered the top rate from 91% to 70%. The corporate rate used to be 52% or higher. Capital gains rates were double or triple what they are now. Again, that money has to be paid back, eventually.

The rich aren’t going to be the ones to make up for all of those losses to the Treasury, the prime source for our 22 trillion in debt. It’s going to be the poor, the working class and the middle class who pay it back, one way or another.

Trump didn’t help a soul, other than himself and his rich friends.

trey wingo@wingoz
Quick tip: you DON’T pay for their livings. Not even close. TV revenues and all the other corporate deals pay for everything. Just being real.

Quick tip: Yes, football fans DO pay for their living. Who do you think watches the games?

TV revenues boil down to the continued belief that the game will attract X number of eyeballs for ad revenues — and the actuality of this happening. If only rich people watched those games, they’d literally lose 99% or more of that. No rank and file fans? No ad revenues. At least not enough to pay for million-dollar salaries.

Just being real.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by Billy_T.

Review by The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/31/the-end-of-the-myth-by-greg-grandin-review

Excerpt:

Is it all just a glitch, as centrist pundits would have it, an inexplicable freak-out in our grand but uneven evolution towards an ever more perfect democracy? Or is it a foreseeable extension of centuries of racist violence, Malcolm X’s chickens finally knocking at the roost?

Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth leans towards the latter explanation, but he provides a more complicated answer than those two simple options allow. The myth to which his title refers is that of the frontier. Other countries have borders, Grandin writes, but “only the United States has had a frontier”, always shifting, and making itself – and its people – anew. For most of American history it was an ever-expanding boundary, a terrain less geographic than metaphorical and messianic. It referred at first to the landmass west of the Allegheny Mountains, then to lands west of the Mississippi River, then west of the Rocky Mountains. The frontier would cover most of the planet before it took an abstract turn and came to mean endless economic growth, the cosmos conceived as an ever-expanding market – overseen, of course, by US banks and a few fleets of aircraft carriers.

But before it was anything else, Grandin makes clear, the frontier was a zone of genocidal violence. For the earliest settlers, America was a spiritual aspiration as much as an actual locale. The land’s apparent boundlessness offered a chance at rebirth and redemption. If people lived there already, they would have to go elsewhere, or be exterminated. And so they were, from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to, eventually, the Pacific. For the men who would later be mythologised as the “Founding Fathers”, conquest – the right of white settlers to seize whatever land they wanted – was from the start inseparable from liberty. Freedom, in the American sense of the word, was unimaginable without the frontier, limitless land for the taking just beyond the boundaries of the known.

Class conflict, again and again, would be evaded by deflecting violence outward to the frontier, and by projecting class resentments on to race

This proved convenient in many ways. Social contradictions – between the rich and the landless, between those who believed human beings could be owned and those who disagreed – did not have to be addressed when they could be pushed ever outwards, to the west. If the young nation began to feel too crowded or tense, it could always, in the words of James Madison, “expand the sphere”. Class conflict, again and again, would be evaded by deflecting violence outward to the frontier, and by projecting class resentments on to race.

Interesting evolution, Mac.

Last time I took the test — a year or two ago — I had minus 9s. Put me pretty close to where you are, if memory serves. May take it again in the near future.

One can find the Ur-test online, I’m pretty sure. This one is based on Adorno’s F-Scale.

. . . .

wv wrote:

Basically, staying in the realm of whats do-able, I’d like to see America be a nation of a gazillion SMALL businesses. I dont mind SMALL-capitalism, if thats what ya wanna call it. I’d like to see all the big stuff socialized. Energy, Transportation, education, health-care, environment-care. I’d like to see corporate-personhood destroyed.

I think Americans define “capitalism” in different ways, so that’s a bit of a problem. We’d have to agree to a definition, for starters.

For righties, in my experience, it just means trade and commerce and business (in general) in the private sector, which isn’t how I’d define it at all. It’s historically unprecedented and fairly recent, and America itself wasn’t a “capitalist” nation until after the Civil War.

So, again, we’ve have to come to some kind of agreement about what it is and isn’t.

I fall back on this way of defining it:

1. You build custom chairs for a living. With your own two hands. No employees. You do everything, from A to Z, including sales and hauling your product to market. You’re not a capitalist.

2. You hire workers to build those chairs for you. They own nothing they produce. You legally own everything they make. You take the surplus value they generate, as if you did all the work, and it’s yours too. You decide how much to value their labor. They have no say in the matter, legally or in practical terms. You’re a capitalist.

I’m in favor of the first kind of commerce, not the second. I’d ban the second entirely.

Zooey wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Put them on the defensive for a change.

Yeah.

That seems obvious to me.

So obvious, in fact, that is raises the question, “Why AREN’T Democrats doing that?”

And the only answer that makes any sense, is this…

A goal scored against the GOP is a goal scored against their own benefactors.

That is the only explanation for why the Democrats behave the way they do. They kiss the same ring. Nothing else explains their behavior as well, and no other explanation is as simple.

Makes sense, given the fact that Trump and the GOP have given them more ammunition than they could possibly need to just flat out crush them. But they seem not to even try. The Dems actually seem to be the party on the defensive all the time . . . which makes no sense.

Good cop/bad cop, perhaps.

Stepping back a bit further: If we compare the two parties, not to each other, but to an actual set of standards for moral and ethical conduct, representing our interests, doing what’s best for we the people, protecting the planet, etc. etc. . . . they both fail on an epic scale, and have done so for generations. In short, they both suck.

But if we compare them to each other — which is the way I think most Americans view our politics — it’s clear that the Dems are the better choice on the issues. Republicans choose judges who clearly make life worse for most Americans. They craft tax policy that clearly exacerbates economic inequality and injustice. They deregulate business and finance in a way that will clearly hurt workers and the environment. They “get tough on crime” in a way that clearly hurts Americans, especially minorities. Their policies toward women clearly hurt them. Their asylum and border policies are clearly sadistic and obscenely cruel. Their support for Christian fundamentalism is clearly a danger to the freedom of all Americans, etc. etc.

If we compare the two parties to actual standards of justice, decency, right-conduct, and so on, they consistently fail on a massive scale. But if we compare them to each other . . . we really only have one choice.

That pisses me off, and no doubt everyone else here.