monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

@Olivier5,

I had thought - like most who understand politics - the "neo-" in "neo-liberal" referred to the meaning of "liberal" in the meaning it is used where this term was invented/first used.
Liberal outside the USA means something different ...

1 Reply

@snood,

Quote:

the smarmy tongue baths being given to Plump by his spineless crew.

Aside from the more run-of-the-mill sycophancy, the precedent case here is that cabinet meeting stunt in July where each member of the cabinet took turns in an apparent competition for Most Excellent Toady as Trump sat there looking like this....

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/RyLo1LR3XrbzGUDou_ZEYYJ2u5c=/0x0:4790x3383/920x613/filters:focal(1770x411:2536x1177):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/55215271/GettyImages_695238494.0.jpg

1 Reply

@blatham,

(problem with that link)

1 Reply

@hightor,

Image not coming through for others? It's from a Vox piece on that ridiculed "cabinet meeting"

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This is, in all ways, disgusting.

Quote:

The Trump administration is waging a linguistic battle across official Washington, seeking to shift public perception of key policies by changing the way the federal government talks about climate change, scientific evidence and disadvantaged communities.

The push drew fresh attention after employees at the Department of Health and Human Services were told to avoid certain words — including “vulnerable” “entitlement” and “diversity” — when preparing requests for next year’s budget. But the effort to disappear certain language and replace it with other terms is much broader, sparking resistance from career officials in multiple federal agencies, outside experts and congressional Democrats.

Climate change, for example, has for months presented a linguistic minefield; multiple references to it have been purged repeatedly at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department...

WP

If something happened in the culture which led to Orwell's 1984 once again gaining a very high profile such that, say, high schools across the nation added it to their mandatory reading lists and if a very popular movie of the book hit theaters like gangbusters, guess who would try to shut this down.

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If anyone is legitimately interested in the neoliberal reality in the US, they can quite easily search for articles and interviews with Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, or Cornel West.

Or you can continue to pretend I made it up so you don't have to confront what you've turned into.

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@Lash,

A good idea, equivalent would be buying American Swiss cheese and write afterwards an expertise about Emmentaler, Appenzeller, Tête de Moine, Vacherin Mont d'Or, ...

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@Lash,

Quote:

If anyone is legitimately interested in the neoliberal reality in the US, they can quite easily search for articles and interviews with Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, or Cornel West.

How do you determine if their analyses are truly "legitimate" and authoritative and not just opinion? West, for instance, doesn't strike me as an especially coherent political thinker. Moralist Hedges obviously has a religious axe to grind. Chomsky's best work was done years ago. I'd look for other sources, or better yet, just develop my own conclusions.

2 Replies

Quote:

David Frum‏Verified account
@davidfrum
Stanford U Prof of Medicine, former Air Force surgeon, loses nomination for DoD health job for saying, "how insane it is that in the United States of America a civilian can go out and buy a semiautomatic weapon like an AR-15.”

story here

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@hightor,

Quote:

Re: Lash (Post 6561331)
Quote:
If anyone is legitimately interested in the neoliberal reality in the US, they can quite easily search for articles and interviews with Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, or Cornel West.

That discussion, though interesting, is irrelevant to this thread.

Lash has a project here:
1) divert conversations critical of what Trump, the GOP and modern conservatism are up to
2) attempt to denigrate or invalidate liberalism and the Democratic party through pushing ideologues from the far left

1 Reply

Let's see now....every single democrat voted AGAINST lowering taxes. Rosie O'Donnell was even offering $2 million bribes to try to make sure no tax cut was enacted.

What's the strategy here, I wonder?

Oh, yeah, I see...that will get them tens of million of votes in 2018 and 2020 from the people who got tax cuts (i.e., all the people). They'll win every election 98% - 2%, now, eh?

Everyone HATES having their taxes cut.

1 Reply

Will tax cuts pay for themselves as Republicans like Paul Ryan have been insisting since forever? Now that this tax bill has passed, what do you really think, sir?

Quote:

NBC News‏Verified account
@NBCNews
This tax cut is going to cost 1.6 trillion dollars more to the deficit- are you saying that the growth we’re going to get from this tax cut will equal what we get from the deficit?

Speaker Ryan: "Nobody knows the answer to that question."

But it is actually not at all clear that Ryan believes even this new claim. There's a damned good chance that he knows it won't happen but has never had that as a goal at all. An economy that elevates all is definitely NOT what the Koch brothers or key conservative economists desire. Because the poor deserve to be poor and the rich deserve to be rich.

But these people can only get what they want - the permanent destruction of citizen democracy - through destroying the necessary precursors to citizen government.

1 Reply

@blatham,

The way to avoid deficits is not to kill the economy by raising taxes. It is to eliminate the massive amount of wasteful spending congress authorizes, and otherwise make government services more efficient.

But, to do that, you would need to drain the swamp.

Hence Trump.

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@hightor,

I agree with these brilliant guys. I'm not in denial about the facts, and neither are they, so there's no reason to avoid what they have to say.

1 Reply

@blatham,

The discussion touched on neoliberalism.

I responded.

You're beginning to be a hysterical caricature. Plenty of people discussed neoliberalism.

You obviously cannot countenance criticism from the left, so you've created an insane narrative to try to censor me. What are you afraid of?

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Quote:

This marks a new era in American politics. The Republican Party is no longer just obfuscating the truth or defending the president when he is accused of wrongdoing. Rather, Mr. Trump, Fox News and Republicans in Congress seem to be actively using falsehoods to prepare an assault on the institutions that allow American democracy to function.

NYT

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@Lash,

Confront it?

I’m proud of being a neoliberal.

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Let's round up the most insane peckerheads in the country and put them in positions of leadership.

Quote:

Yashar Ali 🐘‏Verified account
@yashar
New: Senior WH advisor at Homeland Security pushed claims that Obama's memoir was ghost written by former anti-Vietnam War radical Bill Ayers, that Fmr CIA Director John Brennan converted to Islam & that Eric Holder had been a member of the Black Panthers.

CNN

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Quote:

Garry Kasparov‏Verified account
@Kasparov63
More Garry Kasparov Retweeted Steve Silberman
Until Trump, I believed that official public spectacles of personal loyalty and nationalism that reminded me of the Stalinism were limited to dictatorships.

Yeah? Well what the **** would he know about it?

0 Replies

Quote:

Democrats are losing support from many - including me - as they move further left

I was active part of the Democratic Party apparatus during the first decade of this century and though much of President Obama’s time in office. I worked at the Democratic National Committee’s Political Department in Washington, served as a national official in the High School Democrats and College Democrats, worked on the Obama campaign’s National Youth Committee, and did consulting work for Democratic candidates.

During the early years of the Obama administration I saw firsthand how the optimism and audacious hope that brought President Obama to office soon began to turn to resentful hatred of conservatives and worsened as time went on.

Nowadays this new visceral hostility has led many on the left to paint even the most mundane policy action by Republicans as “racist” or “killing people.” This was a standard liberal talking point during the fight over Republican efforts to repeal and replace ObamaCare and in the current fight over the GOP tax bill – “Armageddon,” as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has called it.

This hostility explains how we went from the party of Bill Clinton, which won states and districts deep in Middle America, to Hillary Clinton dismissing half the country as “deplorables” two decades later. Hillary Clinton contributed to the seemingly unbridgeable and historic political divide we now see in our country.

A new breed of Democratic activists is rising in the party.. For them, destroying conservatives is almost as worthwhile a goal as promoting their progressive causes.

The Democratic Party I see today is very different from the one I knew and worked for in my younger years. Instead of seeking support from the center of the political spectrum it has moved ever leftward, embracing positions that leave millions of Americans feeling left out.

The centrist policies that made Bill Clinton a two-term president are far different from the radical leftist policies of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who calls himself a Democratic Socialist rather than a Democrat.

Democrats were shocked when the people they were seeking to benefit began protesting their policy ideas. Rather than exploring free-market proposals from conservatives, Democrats pressed on and passed ObamaCare. They hoped for a vote of confidence in the 2010 elections from a thankful American people.

A wave came, but it was in the opposite direction as Republicans achieved a historic sweep of Congress. Democrats lost over 63 seats in the House, the largest House swing since 1948.

My Democratic colleagues and associates at the time were flabbergasted. The very people they believed they had been trying to “help” turned against them in droves.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/12/15/democrats-are-losing-support-from-many-including-me-as-move-further-left.html

Haters gunna hate.

1 Reply

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