“Stalin had higher positives and lower negatives than Yeltsin….”

====================

“….Secondly, in terms of finances, they might as well have had unlimited refills. Forget fundraising dinners and appealing to donors, never mind Russia’s electoral law that supposedly capped campaign spending at $3 million for each presidential candidate (as an interesting aside, the communists did, in fact, abide by this rule, although that likely had more to do with their empty coffers as opposed to, say, actually feeling morally obligated to adhere to said provision than anything else), for as was the case with a great deal of the members within the fourth estate, the fear of a communist victory was such that the Oligarchs, as to who, at the bare minimum, likely stood to face both jail time and the loss of their considerable wealth in the wake of a triumph by Zyuganov #DroppingRhymes, did everything in their power so as to ensure a Yeltsin victory, putting up somewhere between $700 million and $2 billion, according to estimates, to finance the campaign. Yeah…

Finally, Gorton, Dresner, Shumate, and, obviously, Yeltsin, by extension, greatly benefited from the contributions that were made by many of the latter’s minions, as to who pulled out all the stops — legal or otherwise — in order to deliver a w for the president. Among the favorite tactics employed by these goons included “[the] cancellation of hotel reservations made by the Zyuganov campaign, issuing false invitations to Zyuganov press conferences with the wrong times, and the publication and distribution of fake extremist Communist programs.” Even better, “The Communist candidate’s speeches and position papers were blacked out in the major media, and voters could learn about Zyuganov’s program only if they happened upon a rally or leaflet.” Noice.

At the same time, however, all of the dirrty money and political black ops in the world could do nothing to remove Yeltsin from his precarious political predicament, for as the team soon discovered upon conducting their own analysis primarily by, you know, asking questions of actual substance, it wasn’t just that the majority of the Russian people didn’t like the guy #DoubleNegative — it was that they justifiably saw him as “a friend who had betrayed them, a populist who had become imperial[,]” to further borrow from Kramer’s article, and there was more bad news. According to Dresner, “Stalin had higher positives and lower negatives than Yeltsin. We actually tested the two in polls and focus groups. More than 60% of the electorate believed Yeltsin was corrupt; more than 65% believed he had wrecked the economy. We were in a deep, deep hole.”

Still, it didn’t exactly take an experienced pollster to recognize that the issue that had the entire country — mobsters and oligarchs, etc., notwithstanding, of course — understandably seething was of the economic variety (even those same Russian newspapers with the empty statistical findings were on top of the matter). More specifically, Russkies were all up in arms over the dire financial straits #MoneyForNothing that had beset government workers as to who hadn’t seen a paycheck in MONTHS despite Yeltsin promising to remedy the situation in a development that might as well have induced a Dresner facepalm but nevertheless provided the team with a teachable, if not also as to what one would think should have made for a classic “Captain Obvious”, moment. As Dresner explained to Dyachenko, “You can’t just promise these things. You have to do them. And then you have to make sure the people know what you’ve done.”

In order to accomplish this relative to the criminal economic deprivation that was facing the aforementioned members of the proletariat (sorry, it’s just too easy), the triad advised Yeltsin to, in the political equivalent of flogging someone in a public square/Village Green, chastise those officials as to who had failed to apportion the money that had been earmarked for said salary arrears as per his instructions — a proposal that both Yeltsin and the press were all too happy to implement and cover, respectively.

Yet even so, while such a feel-good PR exercise might have looked great for the cameras and bought the president some desperately needed political capital, without the money that was needed to actually alleviate said financial suffering the entire undertaking would have been seen as yet another empty gesture, and it was at this pivotal point wherein the Clinton connection paid crucial dividends (no pun intended), although you wouldn’t know it from reading Time’s featured report, which is rather curious given that the whole lipstick on a pig scenario was certainly not lost on other reputable news outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, never mind esteemed Kremlinologist Lilia Shevtsova.

Strong-armed by the administration, and in a move that was aptly characterized by Michael Dobbs in The WaPo as “an expression of political support by Western governments for Russian leader Boris Yeltsin in advance of presidential elections in June[,]” the normally, or at least outwardly, politically neutral International Monetary Fund became, with a single transaction, Boris’ single largest donor by approving a loan for $10.2 billion (the second largest loan of its kind in IMF history to that point, by the way, that was only superseded by the one that was given to Mexico in 1995 for $17.8 billion), with a crucial installment of more than $4 billion being made available during that first year, thereby enabling Yeltsin to repay $2.8 billion in back wages as well as giving him the ability to follow through on his promise to increase spending on social programs. Sidebar — there were social programs in Russia during the ‘90s?

Even at the time, the sentiment that was expressed by many Russian political experts and as to which has subsequently been substantiated by history was that without the sudden infusion of Das Kapital #SorryNotSorry, Yeltsin almost assuredly would have lost — possibly in the first round — and the West went still further to influence the outcome of the election. While privately the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Thomas Pickering, unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Grigory Yavlinsky, a democratic candidate as to who presented a considerable threat to Yeltsin, to back out of the first round so as to increase the odds of success for Boris Nikolayevich, the then-managing director of the IMF, Michel Camdessus, went out of his way to state that not only was the aforesaid loan hardly a blank check, but also, and more importantly, that should “a new Government” come to power that would fail to adhere to “the commitments of Russia established in these documents,” that their “support would be interrupted[,]” thereby essentially blackmailing the Russian populace into voting for Yeltsin, and the results spoke for themselves in the opinion polls that were conducted by ROMIR (Russian Opinion and Market Research) in which the amount of support for the president more than doubled from a paltry 8% on February 18 to 17% on March 17, and suddenly the campaign had traction.

From there, and in order to capitalize on their newfound momentum, the team knew that it needed to …see link
Link:https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/from-russia-with-revenge-536b25921ca6

=================
Trump has a point about the polls

Some pollsters are still grappling with the same problems that plagued battleground state surveys four years ago.
link:https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/17/trump-polls-biden-324210
“….
……..But some pollsters, especially the relatively few who conduct surveys in battleground states, are still grappling with the problems that plagued those polls four years ago. In fact, most pollsters believe that, on balance, state polls are overstating the scale of Biden’s advantage.

That was precisely the problem in 2016: The national polls were largely accurate, to within the margin of error. But there were too few state polls, and many of those that were conducted failed to collect accurate data, especially from white voters without college degrees in key swing states.

And those issues haven’t been fixed.

“I would say that most, if not all, of the concerns that we expressed still hold — some to a lesser degree,” said Courtney Kennedy, director of research at the Pew Research Center and lead author of the polling industry’s post-2016 autopsy. “But I think some of the fundamental, structural challenges that came to a head in 2016 are still in place in 2020.”

Polling errors are not uncommon in presidential elections. But pollsters see a real risk this year that the mistakes of 2016 will be repeated. Their colleagues still are not accounting for the fact that voters with greater educational attainment are more likely to complete surveys — and more likely to vote for Democratic candidates.

“There’s still a number of state polls, in particular, that are not fixing this issue,” said Kennedy.
….
……
…….. — the problem that pollsters identified in 2016 remains. Not enough surveys are being conducted in the battleground states, and those that exist are failing to account for a key political dynamic of modern politics, especially in the Trump era: the rapid movement of lower-income white voters to Republicans and upscale whites to Democrats.

Pollsters are looking for answers. One of the major takeaways of the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s post-2016 autopsy was that state polls that didn’t weight, or adjust, their samples to include more white voters who hadn’t graduated college missed a key element of Trump’s coalition. In previous elections, the differences in white voters’ preferences along educational lines were smaller, but they began to grow during the past decade and accelerated with Trump on the ballot in 2016.

“Before 2014, it wasn’t that big of a deal because the reality is non-college white voters and college-educated white voters — the distinction between the two wasn’t as dramatic,” said Democratic pollster Jefrey Pollock. “But starting with 2014, that began to cleave a lot and is now obviously humongous.”

GOP pollster Glen Bolger said he believes a combination of pollsters’ inability to get the right educational mix and to persuade potential Trump voters to respond and answer truthfully to phone polls is pointing their surveys in a slightly Democratic direction.

“I don’t know how big the effect is. I also don’t know what the ratio is between it being ‘shy Trump’ voters and interviewing too many college graduates and not enough non-college grads,” Bolger said. “But I do think those are factors in some of the polls that show a particularly wide lead for Biden at this point in time. And I do think that things will be closer in the states than the polls indicate right now.”
…
…..
……

At last week’s annual convention of the American Association of Public Opinion Research — held online because of the coronavirus pandemic — Nate Cohn, the New York Times data journalist who has worked with Siena College on their multimillion-dollar polling partnership, observed that the state polls leaned way too far toward Democrats in 2014 and 2016. In 2018, he said, the polls were more accurate but still showed a Democratic slant, especially “in a number of white, working-class states,” like Indiana and Ohio.

And, Cohn noted in his presentation, it might be happening again this year.

“So far in 2020, it sure seems like Joe Biden is faring particularly well in the states where the polls were most biased toward Hillary Clinton four years ago,” Cohn told the virtual attendees.

As if on cue, a new poll was released in Michigan on Tuesday: It showed Biden ahead by a whopping 16 points.

============
link:https://swarajyamag.com/insta/russian-interference-in-us-elections-maybe-but-the-us-did-help-boris-yeltsin-get-elected
—–
“….According to political analyst and former Hillary Clinton confidant Dick Morris, in 1996 the then US President Bill Clinton meddled in Russian affairs, helping Yeltsin get elected to a second term. Morris said:

When I worked for Clinton, Clinton called me and said, ‘I want to get Yeltsin elected as president of Russia against Gennady Zyuganov, who was the communist who was running against him. Putin was Zyuganov’s major backer… It became public that Clinton would meet with me every week. We would review the polling that was being done for Yeltsin that was being done by a colleague of mine, who was sending it to me every week. We, Clinton and I, would go through it and Bill would pick up the hotline and talk to Yeltsin and tell him what commercials to run, where to campaign, what positions to take. He basically became Yeltsin’s political consultant….

Morris believes that Putin resented the intervention at the time by Bill Clinton and took his revenge out on Hillary Clinton. Although there is no indication of this belief from Putin himself, it seems like 2016 was karmic payback for 1996…
————

“…“It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it — and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body…”
==============

I would like to cut some parts off researchers. Just, ya know, for the sake of science.

w
v

InvaderRam wrote:

wv wrote:

Is it my imagination or have you been posting more on Politics lately, Invader?
Is there a reason for that? Or am i imagining that? Do you think of yourself as a ‘leftist’ or a ‘liberal’ or just a Seahawk fan like Zooey?

it’s not your imagination. honestly? with the pandemic and the protests i’ve been leaning toward this side of the board more often lately.

i’m not particularly political. and for some of the reasons you stated. i often am conflicted between the way i would want to see things done vs being practical and trying to focus on things that are within the realm of possibility.

but also. how do you get 8 billion people to agree on a way forward? how do you even get half of them to agree on a way forward?

but then i also think does it even matter? is this planet supposed to go on forever? are humans meant to exist forever? the universe? sometimes i think i should just enjoy the world for what it is. faults and all. but then other days i think it does matter, and we should try and make this place better while we’re here. even if you can’t reach that ideal society.

i think what i would want is that we treat each other compassionately. universal healthcare. universal basic income. free education. free housing. i do think those are steps towards that. so if that makes me a leftist then i guess i’m leftist.

it wouldn’t solve everything. but then what would? again. trying to get 300 million people (not to mention 8 billion) to agree. well good luck with that. you can’t even get 30 million to agree.

i think you always have the end goal in mind. but you also enjoy the journey if that makes any sense. so even if you don’t ever reach the goal, you at least appreciate the steps it takes to get there?

so if we could get at least universal healthcare and universal basic income before i pass. and a mars landing. i’d be pretty cool with that.

————–

I hear ya. I can relate to a lot of that. You covered a lot of ground there.

Our human brains have a lot of shit goin on inside them, dont they. I wonder if dolphins think about all this shit. Leftist-Dolphins probly do. They probly swim around thinking ‘what the hell is wrong with this whole entire pod…’

w
v

InvaderRam wrote:

i don’t know. but i do know that we’re currently going in the wrong direction.

===================

Is it my imagination or have you been posting more on Politics lately, Invader?
Is there a reason for that? Or am i imagining that? Do you think of yourself as a ‘leftist’ or a ‘liberal’ or just a Seahawk fan like Zooey?

One of the continuing-thots that bounce around in my head on the topic of ‘what is a leftist’ is what i might call the ‘utopian’ notions and the ‘practical’ notions. Sometimes those things do not play together, well.

On tuesdays and thursdays i might think ending all forms of capitalism and private property is a good longterm goal. Maybe. But then that kind of utopian notion is often utterly, completely counter-fucking-productive to building a big tent in order to get practical policies done — like Medicare For All. Etc.

So deep down I might be a pure Commie. At least on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Maybe.
But then what matters in the real world is not my commie-brain. What matters is Medicare For All. Something DO-able.

There’s always this clash between utopian/aspirational broad ideas, And fucking real-world policies and building real, actual coalitions, with real actual people.
At least that clash exists IN MY Head. Its always there.

Blah blah blah.

w
v

Cal wrote:

I like what Reed said just before the video started. I thought this was an interesting comment.

This [the most recent shift in the protests] is the bread and circus stuff that appeals to the other side and you can feel the long hand of the Ford Foundation and leadership development corporations shaping the institutional structure of a political economy of race relations administration in a certain direction so that it moves in a slightly different direction, farther away from anything that smells anything like class re-distribution.

Interesting stuff–I looked up the Ford Foundation and was intrigued to see BLM protest photos on the website of a multi-billion non-profit that has been operating since the 60’s.

Off topic–If you still need info WV about sharpening a (Japanese) knife a friend of mine sent me an insightful email as I need to put a sharper blade on my knife.

=================

Yeah, we used to talk about a Thomas Frank collection of essays back in the 90s, called ‘Commodify Your Dissent.’ Its kindof about that whole subject of the system taking authentic-dissent and turning it into something tame so it doesnt actually threaten capitalism. Think of CHE earrings and such.

This ‘process’ of domesticating and shaping dissent-movements
would not work if the citizens actually had higher political-IQs. But they’ve been dummed-down so far, that its not that hard for the system to nudge them, shape them, bewilder them, tame them, divert them…

Ah well.

I dont wanna sound too dark though. 🙂 This latest uprising did indeed lead to some nice reforms in some places. Colorado.

w
v
—-
link:https://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler/dp/0393316734
Amazon.com Review
In this thought-provoking collection of essays, editor Thomas Frank and other contributors to the contrarian journal the Baffler examine the unprecedented ascendancy of business as the dominating force in American life. If the closest historical parallel is with the Gilded Age and its all-powerful robber barons, Frank and his ilk clearly see themselves as the muckrakers out to expose the absurdities and abuses of big business. Today, however, advertising has come to permeate every aspect of our society, and corporations are in the business of manufacturing culture–what Frank calls the “Culture Trust.” These essays analyze the ways in which this Culture Trust has co-opted the power of dissent by appropriating the language and symbolism of nonconformist youth culture, from hippie slang to grunge fashion; in other words, when the media markets rebellion, it becomes just another consumer choice. As evidence, the essayists explore the image of consumer as rebel pioneered by publications such as Details and Wired, as well as the preeminence of “revolutionary” business gurus such as Tom Peters. The result is a highly original book, a satirical and savage indictment of ’90s consumerist culture.
Review
You’d have to look back at the fights between New York intellectuals in the fifties to find the sort of verbal firepower unleashed here. — Nation

[Frank is] … perhaps the most provocative young cultural critic of the moment, and certainly the most malcontent… Although he has been to graduate school … both his thinking and his prose hark back to a time when the radical left was something more in America than conferences and seminars attended by Foucault-steeped professors. Frank has thrown off the mandarin jargon; for him it’s about wealth and power, haves and have-nots, loud and simple–it’s as if he were channeling Herbert Marcuse and C. Wright Mills and Thorstein Veblen through a boom box. — The New York Times Book Review, Gerald Marzorati
From the Back Cover
The 1980s and 1990s have seen an enormous increase in the power of business over the American mind. Not since the Gilded Age have the robber barons of business accumulated more wealth or won more popular attention. But where the tycoons of yore built railroads or banks, today culture stands at the heart of American enterprise and mass entertainment has become its economic dynamo. For a decade The Baffler magazine has been an invigorating voice of dissent against these developments, in the tradition of the muckrakers and H. L. Mencken’s The American Mercury. Commodity Your Dissent gathers together the best of its excoriating criticism of the new American cultural order, exploring such peculiar developments as the birth of the rebel consumer as hero in the pages of Wired and Details; the dramatic rise of “alternative” culture in the post-Nirvana era; the appearance of new business gurus like Tom Peters and corporate fads like “reengineering”; the ever-accelerating race to market youth culture; and the encroachment of advertising and commercial enterprise into every last nook and cranny of American life.
About the Author
Thomas Frank is the author of One Market Under God and The Conquest of Cool.

zn wrote:

wv wrote:

“you can define leftism as rejecting capitalism”

Is that true of social democracy? I don’t even think social democracy is anti small business. I think that social democracy–which is left/progressive, of course–supports a mixed economy where large wealthy interests don’t and can’t dominate public and economic life.

I have recently found myself in arguments many times with righties who assume social democracy is socialism and I then have to explain the difference.

It’s funny if some leftists don’t even make the same distinction.

================

Well Beau’s notion is not how i would put it. I’d probly say something like
Leftists reject the worst aspects of capitalism, among other things. I think thats a better ‘strategic’ position at any rate. Leftists oughta think about making the tent bigger, not smaller.

w
v

Adolph referred to Preston H. Smith’s book: