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The Trump presidency

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coley said:
It's depressing that the WC can be conned into believing the meagre scraps that the establishment has granted them can be obtained 'Gratis' by the poor.
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The US state spends more per capita on healthcare than the UK and most of Europe. And that's state funding. In a country where few services are actually free at the point of use. Madness. Well not madness, let's call it what it is. Evil.
 
SpookyFrank said:
The US state spends more per capita on healthcare than the UK and most of Europe. And that's state funding. In a country where few services are actually free at the point of use. Madness. Well not madness, let's call it what it is. Evil.
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Not following you here? "Per capita on health care" do you mean in providing health care for the general population or providing support for big pharma?
 
CRI said:
GOP Bill Would Let Your Employer Demand to See Your Genetic Information

A little-noticed bill moving through Congress would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing or risk paying a penalty of thousands of dollars, and would let employers see that genetic and other health information.

Giving employers such power is now prohibited by legislation including the 2008 genetic privacy and nondiscrimination law known as GINA. The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating explicitly that GINA and other protections do not apply when genetic tests are part of a “workplace wellness” program.

Interesting to read the background to this - employers penalising staff who refused to participate in or failed "voluntary" health checks by making their health premiums higher. This was so popular, it got pushed into the ACA as an amendment. There's no evidence that compulsory involvement in workplace "wellness" programmes actually improved health, but it allowed health insurance companies to cream it and employers to keep their insurance provision costs lower.

This new bill seems to build on that. Proper Sci Fi stuff.
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The reason insurers want that genetic information is not for the purposes of providing better healthcare, it's for the commercial potential of it. It will also be used to deny treatment for those who have pre-existing conditions which don't even exist yet.

Big Data doesn't get much bigger than DNA, even though we each have only about three gigabytes worth. Well, six gigabytes if you convert it to binary. Put those six gigabytes together with a medical record and a family history though and that dataset becomes metadata, which does indeed allow for all sorts of frightening sci fi stuff. Lucky we defeated those totalitarian bastards over in the Soviet Union eh? Now we can have corporate totalitarianism instead.
 
SpookyFrank said:
The reason insurers want that genetic information is not for the purposes of providing better healthcare, it's for the commercial potential of it. It will also be used to deny treatment for those who have pre-existing conditions which don't even exist yet.

Big Data doesn't get much bigger than DNA, even though we each have only about three gigabytes worth. Well, six gigabytes if you convert it to binary. Put those six gigabytes together with a medical record and a family history though and that dataset becomes metadata, which does indeed allow for all sorts of frightening sci fi stuff. Lucky we defeated those totalitarian bastards over in the Soviet Union eh? Now we can have corporate totalitarianism instead.
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I'm somewhat tempted to have a genetic assay done on myself, to help prepare myself for any potential hurdles in the future if nothing else.
 
SpookyFrank said:
A lot of people said as much when the ACA was originally passed. A lot of compromises were made to appease both the health insurance industry and the lunatic republicans who kept talking about how the very idea of improved access to healthcare was going to restrict consumer choice and thus amounted to communism.
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It should also be remembered that the major "compromise" was the killing of the public option for insurance, a measure which was immensely more popular than the rest of the ACA bill. And despite the claim that it was Senate Republicans and right wing Democrats who killed it, it was Obama who did a deal with the lobbyists to do away with it.
 
coley said:
Just why does America spend so much on 'defence'???? They can wipe out civilisation 4 times over with what they have already in place.
Or is it really just a convenient way of fooling the public into pouring money into the hands of the 1%?
let's get real, how much did that Osprey cost ( the one lost in Yemen) $63 million, I believe? for one plane???
One F35 costs more than the entire military budget of some countries.
TTTs recent about turn on NATO? Common sense belatedly arriving? Or the GOP realising a reduced commitment to NATO means much less money poured into the military/industrial complex?
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Actually the US probably would be spending even more on its military but for NATO. Post Cold War NATO was seen as a cheap way of the imperial US keeping Russia in a box and Germans safely pointing in the right direction. US defence spending is pretty unrelated to NATO commitments. It's got a globalised empire to maintain. The US would still be overmatching the Russian nuke arsenal for instance and the 5th Fleet would still be deployed to the Gulf as needed. The US would still be prepared for a big naval war over Taiwan. Trump just whines that some of the European auxiliaries are not pulling their weight militarily and looking too damn fat and happy with their socialised medicine and long retirements in comparison with Americans.

The Pentagon exists to imagine future US wars and buy the kit to fight them. Often with what is a relatively friendly deeply entwined business partner China. But the US fights few wars and lately they have in fact been rather small and better addressed with bribes and copious tea drinking with tribesmen than a fleet of F-35s.

Like most things the US does it's more about making a buck than real defence needs. In part it's performative display of deterrent over capacity but it keeps a pretty valuable part of the economy pumped up and yes some very wealthy people on a sort of corporate welfare but that really pales beside the mostly parasitic Finance sector which now makes about half of all US profits.

In some ways the US Military-Industrial complex is a stealthy Septic version of state socialism. Building the whole US highway system was justified by Ike in defence terms but such statist sleight of hand smells a bit off to most Big Gubmint hating Septics. The military is one area where a wide spectrum of patriotic Americans can agree the state has a primary role. It's a politically acceptable way of the Federal state pumping vast amount of money into state economies. There are in fact better ways to do this but this still has lots of useful side effects. Pentagon pork basically built all the infrastructure the California tech sector rests on for instance. The idea it all grew magically out of nerds in garages is a bit of fairy tale.
 
In The New Yorker THERE IS NO DEEP STATE

Points out the term comes from the Turkish derin devlet and is somewhat hysterical in a US context. That is if you've any knowledge of Turkey or how authoritarian states actually work. Algerian's talk about "le pouvoir" in a similar way. A small powerful unelected clique that pulls the strings behind a sham of "controlled democracy". Here the paranoia has a very real basis.

More accurately Obama complained about The Blob i.e. the foreign policy establishment wedded to the Wilsonian Washington Consensus that he didn't always agree with and had great difficulty bucking. The far more unorthodox Trump appears to be gradually being glopped into some sort of conformity by worldly folk like Mattis and McMasters or his pack of greedy Goldman creatures. This is just the reality of being President and having to work with the available grown ups, real world constraints and institutional resistance based on experience.

Of course while hairy progressives would once bitch about The Man US far right groups have long viewed the Feds as a vast, sometimes Jewish led, conspiracy against their blood and soil idea of America. The basic idea is the US democracy and institutions have no real legitimacy. Them critters in DC are going to sell the country out to the world government at the UN headed by the antichrist. A Deep State that goes all the way down to Hell. It's the rogue regime of a tyrant like George III that must be rebelled against.

Bit ironic really as George III may be the last ruler American's have had who perhaps was as erratic as Trump. Trump actually getting elected while eccentrically fawning over the old reviving Russian enemy of the US security apparatus in a way that would give any Cold Warrior conniptions and threatening to unmake the whole international order might actually be taken as proof that these ideas of how the US works are implausible. If ever there was a President the security establishment should head off it's Trumpski. What actually happened was an FBI director probably nervous of the inevitable Trump led witch hunt that would follow Hillary's election was rather more helpful to The Donald than the Russians ever could be. The obviously distressed Federal apparatus finding itself with a Tweeting aberration at it's head going a pathetically leaky is hardly akin to the recent Turkish mutiny trying to murderously head off the in some ways Trump like Erdogan's consolidation of power and detente with Russia. That's a Deep State all right.

I'm reminded of this bit from Jefferson on the importance of a well informed public and the potential for armed revolt not often quoted in full:
“The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
 
On FiveThirtyEight Don’t Let Trump — Or Any President — Take Credit For Strong Jobs Numbers
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Yet many of the economy’s longer-term challenges remain unresolved. Wage growth has been weak for much of the recovery, continuing a pattern that began even before the recession in 2008 and 2009; even now, wages are growing more slowly for production and nonsupervisory employees than for workers overall. Separate data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics this week showed that growth in productivity — how much economic output workers generate per hour, a key driver of earnings and overall economic growth — remained weak in 2016. And the aging of the baby boom generation is leaving fewer workers to support an ever-growing population of retirees.

Still, Trump was able to begin his term on an economic high note, a sharp contrast to the fast-moving disaster that Obama inherited eight years ago. Only time will tell whether he and Congressional leaders take advantage of that opportunity to address the economy’s deeper issues.
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Points out Presidents outside of recessions don't have much control over the economy and Trump's not had time to have much effect. He just inherited a slack but pretty stable economy with a wide regional variation.

Trump in wanting fast growth (4%) is somewhat at odds with The Fed which worries about inflation and an overheating economy. Most economists are not anticipating US growth much above 2%. It's a fully developed economy not China.

I'd observe a fast growing US economy is usually also accompanied by lots of immigration legal and illegal especially if the construction sector were to take off. True elsewhere as well. The OECD assigned about half of UK post-recession growth to feverishly importing lots of migrant labour. Of course that doesn't necessarily translate into happy voters.
 
J Ed said:
From a protest of a Republican town hall today

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Trump is going to win in 2020, isn't he?
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Depends on which is the bigger fuck-up: The Democratic Party, or TrumpCare. The disgruntled Midwestern types who swung it for Trump aren't going to get any more gruntled when they lose thousands of dollars in health insurance subsidies, and they haven't got an employer to cover it because all those high-paying manufacturing jobs with security and benefits that Trump promised haven't arrived.
 
This is a Republican Congressman from Iowa. Not beating around the bush, but this shit makes my stomach turn. :mad:

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coley said:
No surprises there then, jeez the quicker this generation of evil racist bigots pops its mortal coil the better.
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Can't disagree, but the idea we were brought up with that each generation will be less evil, racist and bigoted than the last doesn't look as clever as it did. The next lot may well think of Bannon as a well-meaning cuck.
 
Raheem said:
Can't disagree, but the idea we were brought up with that each generation will be less evil, racist and bigoted than the last doesn't look as clever as it did. The next lot may well think of Bannon as a well-meaning cuck.
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Can't disagree, the 'younger generation' doesn't seem to maintain its outrage or desire for change.
Mebbes we should just accept that humanities fucked and hope we haven't irreparably damaged the planet for other species?
 
coley said:
Can't disagree, the 'younger generation' doesn't seem to maintain its outrage or desire for change.
Mebbes we should just accept that humanities fucked and hope we haven't irreparably damaged the planet for other species?
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They've said that forever though. The feckless are never good enough

At the start of the first world war and that. They'll learn

There's always hope.
 
On WordForWord2017 Some Arguments Are More Equal Than Others
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Evidence remains as sound a basis for belief as in the 18th century, but is more difficult to find and cling to in the tide of tweets and the flood of calculated falsehoods.

Dr Kate Utting, of the United Kingdom Defence Academy, and a senior lecturer in defence studies at King’s, wondered if ‘the ultimate delusion is that truth will win’.

So these are profound, not passing, questions, raised by two leaders whose short-term manoeuvres threaten long-term damage to some of the fundamental values that underpin rational decision-making in a complex world. Truth is currently not winning, and the casualties – along with the many dead in Syria and Ukraine — and along with the vitality of western democracy — may in the end be any shared sense of objective realities within which to make political decisions about war and peace and freedom and dictatorship.

The Kremlin and the White House are waging assaults on people’s intelligence. In trying to reduce all arguments to fact-free equivalence, the two Presidents are working on the cynical assumption that few enough people have the attention span to doubt, question, check and make up their own mind.

There has been much quoting of George Orwell’s novelistic slogan ‘Ignorance is Strength’ from1984. Orwell also parodied Putin’s admired Soviet Union in Animal Farm with the phrase ‘all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’.

A slogan for non-defeatists in the age of alternative facts could be:

All arguments are not equal. Some arguments are more equal than others. Evidence is strength.
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Piece on the very uneven race between the swift liar versus the plodding fact checker. As "populism" rises the lie soars freed from the cage of reality. Both Trump and Putin are able in the use of falsehood but there are very big differences.

Most people are not exactly stupid but they are efficient avoiders of mental effort and have a short attention span. Information is taken in mainly to confirm prejudices and rejected if it does not. What matters is not objective truth but what feels true. What reassures the fragile sense of self. They like people who look and sound like them and distrust those who don't. They are suckers for simplicity. This has always been so. Demagogues have always played on this.

A very large part of the US electorate is functionally illiterate. They can't read a few paragraphs and understand them. They are increasingly shut out of a changing labour market where such basics are essential. They are not just tired of experts but irritated by the need for expertise. The capacity for handling complexity is shrinking in a world with little space for contemplation that's bombarded with ideologically filtered media and distracted by its smartphone.

Gone are the days of near autarky where the US was an isolated economy playing a zero sum mercantilist game. The 21st century globalised empire that America has created is very, very complicated with many interdependencies. Perhaps genuinely too fragile, in need of constant careful maintenance and liable to combust but that is the reality being retreated from.

Trump is very much a Twittering creature of this moment. The easily digested 140 character President preaching the good news of his wall that will magically Make America Great Again. He will make his people feel that they are the best people, the very best people even if the evidence around them suggests something different. A lifelong audacious liar he may succeed as he is the Bullshitter in Chief.

Putin actually isn't like that. Putin is very much a man of the long dark existential struggles of the 20th century. Every day the former KGB Colonel sits down with a large paper folder of raw intelligence reports and reads them analytically. In a long Russian tradition he's prone to over interpretation. Sometimes seeing plots and schemes that are not there. Overestimating his American enemy's reach and cunning. He's not a grand strategist, as he understands simple models are delusional, but a careful tactician making mostly cautious incremental moves. He is hungry for facts and sees information as power. His system of lies is a carefully maintained construct not simply random blethering.
 
Meanwhile, in Kellyanne Conway-land, today's headline is "OBAMA SPIED ON TRUMP THROUGH HIS MICROWAVE"

She says the “surveillance” may be broader than even Trump suggested. ...

“What I can say is there are many ways to surveil each other,” Conway said as the Trump presidency marked its 50th day in office during the weekend. “You can surveil someone through their phones, certainly through their television sets — any number of ways.”

Conway went on to say that the monitoring could be done with “microwaves that turn into cameras,” adding: “We know this is a fact of modern life.”
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Kellyanne Conway alludes to even wider surveillance of Trump campaign
 
On Politico Lessons From the Fake News Pandemic of 1942
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The parallels between 1942 and today stand out. In both cases, a country undergoing profound demographic and economic change has proven hospitable to many of the same general types of rumors. In 1942, black men allegedly plotted a violent (and sexually violent) coup against white Americans. In more recent times, a Kenyan-born Muslim managed to capture the presidency, and encouraged violent Mexican criminals to vote illegally. Eleanor Roosevelt, a powerful first lady who did in fact champion black civil rights, was allegedly complicit in prompting a race war. Hillary Clinton, a powerful former first lady and would-be president, allegedly trafficked young girls through the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria.

In both eras, for many white Americans—particularly many white men experiencing a decline in economic and political power—these rumors were and are a way to protest a world in which women and people of color demanded greater privilege.

The internet is a faster and wider distribution channel than anything that was remotely imaginable in 1942. Once heralded as a powerful agent of democratization, in more recent months, it has provided a powerful platform for purveyors of rumors, hate speech and fake news. But an empirical study that appeared recently in the Columbia Journalism Review suggests that the internet has not infected Americans equally or indiscriminately with fake news. Republicans tend to be easier marks for conspiracy-laden sites like Breitbart News (which recently claimed, without a shred of evidence, that former President Obama tapped then-candidate Donald Trump’s phone lines) and Infowars (which played a prominent role in promulgating Pizzagate); conversely, Democrats tend to absorb both left-leaning opinion outlets and mainstream outlets that adhere to standard fact-checking and editorial quality standards.

Just as a particular subset of Americans proved unusually receptive to fake news and conspiracy in the 1940s, it may be time to acknowledge that a particular subset of Americans, today, has grown unhinged from reality.
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Slave owning societies tend to be understandably obsessed with the idea of a bloody slave revolt. That the helot livestock that supports the economy is conspiring to rout the masters. Eternally armed vigilance is one response. US attitudes to labour often seem to roots in the old days of slavery. A battle not to be reduced to the level of serfdom with tinges of racial fears.

But what happens when the rising is a more subtle one of demanded rights that eventually puts a black family in the Whitehouse? Passing healthcare legislation that's seen as reparations for slavery. Always portrayed as about to take the guns away, causing panic buying, never doing anything of the sort.

And there rises a man questioning the legitimacy of this President by claiming he was born African. A man who paints "urban" America as an insurgent place of dark terrors. A man who promises to undo that act of Restoration gifting. A man that'll make the Mexicans pay for a wall to keep them out. A man who also puts uppity women in their place.
 
coley said:
Can't disagree, the 'younger generation' doesn't seem to maintain its outrage or desire for change.
Mebbes we should just accept that humanities fucked and hope we haven't irreparably damaged the planet for other species?
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outrage fatigue .........got it myself ...and I'm well in my 5th decade , it's all turning orange
 
CrabbedOne said:
On Politico Lessons From the Fake News Pandemic of 1942
Slave owning societies tend to be understandably obsessed with the idea of a bloody slave revolt. That the helot livestock that supports the economy is conspiring to rout the masters. Eternally armed vigilance is one response. US attitudes to labour often seem to roots in the old days of slavery. A battle not to be reduced to the level of serfdom with tinges of racial fears.

But what happens when the rising is a more subtle one of demanded rights that eventually puts a black family in the Whitehouse? Passing healthcare legislation that's seen as reparations for slavery. Always portrayed as about to take the guns away, causing panic buying, never doing anything of the sort.

And there rises a man questioning the legitimacy of this President by claiming he was born African. A man who paints "urban" America as an insurgent place of dark terrors. A man who promises to undo that act of Restoration gifting. A man that'll make the Mexicans pay for a wall to keep them out. A man who also puts uppity women in their place.
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But when he fails to deliver nothing more than tax cuts to his cronies his supporters will just find more excuses for him.
The issue of "Deplorables' was one HCs bigger mistkes but you can understand where she was coming from and just as importantly, the fact many who were 'outraged' recognised themselves.
 
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