fishmike wrote:

H1AND1 wrote:Gary Johnson does it again: Declines to name the leader of North Korea. I'm all for a system with strong third party candidates in this country but this guy is a joke.

https://politicalwire.com/2016/10/06/johnson-declines-to-name-north-koreas-leader/

He pretty much had my vote on policy. I don't agree with all of his, but some of the big ones I do. Then I heard him speak. I cant tell if there is something wrong with him or he's just stupid as stupid does. What a nightmare.

He's basically a dumbass, unfortunately. I posted this earlier but it's just too ridiculous to not reiterate.

Tweet was deleted or there was problem with the URL:

https://twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/778286060975624192

arkrud wrote:

holfresh wrote:

arkrud wrote:

holfresh wrote:

arkrud wrote:New interesting face in the campaign with some inside info:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/have-a-question-for-independent-presidential-candidate-evan-mcmullin-ask-it-now-2016-10-03
This elections is the last cry for current edging political elite.
Time for new generation to kick in.
Geriatric leaders will not get us too far and for sure not out of stagnation we are in.
Time for change is coming and it is inevitable.

I'm always intrigued by the fact that people are so willing to gravitate to unknown entitles with very little information..Obama elite or geriatric?

Obama is the first African American president. The rest is not so important.
Hilary will be the first woman president...
Then as we will not need first Gay president (Canada did it for us) we can concentrate on someone who can make a difference...
Unless we will want first Jewish president... Will be cool...

So +25 million more people with healthcare not so important?..Capturing and killing Osama Bin Laden not so important? Wind down of wars abroad not important? Iran nuclear deal not so important? Cuba? Staying out of Lybia, Syria, not so important?..Saved the auto industry when Republicans were against it, not important.??..Navigating through the biggest deepest economic downturn since the depression, not important??.. Historic climate deal not so important? The fact that the world no longer hates us and think we are arrogant, not important? Smart Power, not important? Not attacking Iran for Israel's sake not important ?.. Let the space shuttle program die and allowed private industry to enter into the space race which has created an entire new industry against republican wishes..I can go on...

So +25 million more people with healthcare not so important?.. And who will pay for this - all us by premiums rising, probably will be doubling, and a lot of providers getting out of it to stay in business.. Program is not sustainable and over-complicated. I do not think it will last long as is.
Capturing and killing Osama Bin Laden not so important? Not sure why we wait for so long after knowing where he is for 5 years...
Wind down of wars abroad not important? - He finished what was already started.
Iran nuclear deal not so important? - Terrible deal which will have grave consequences.
Cuba? What is has to do with Obama... He was president at a time... And it is just in infant state
Staying out of Lybia, Syria, not so important?.. We are in Syria and we are dangling in Lybia. No ground troops so it will last forever with no results.Waste of time and resources.
Saved the auto industry when Republicans were against it, not important.??.. Bail out some suckers. The jobs are shipped overseas anyways so who cares?
Navigating through the biggest deepest economic downturn since the depression, not important??.. Yep he was there. Watching. Good job watching.
Historic climate deal not so important? - What about it? This "deal" is not binding to anyone.
The fact that the world no longer hates us and think we are arrogant, not important? - LOL... You wish. The world hates up with passion and for the good reason - we are arrogant.
Smart Power,... not important? - Not sure what you mean.
Not attacking Iran for Israel's sake not important ?.. - Not allowing Israel to attack Iran is not new stuff, shipping to Iran billions of dollars is new.
Let the space shuttle program die and allowed private industry to enter into the space race which has created an entire new industry against republican wishes.. - Probably making China to be first on Mars in Mask build rockets.
I can go on...

Ha..Nice try...

meloshouldgo wrote:Mark Blyth breaks down the US economy and Global Trumpism - it's a long video worth every minute of it - plus he has the Scottish accent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkm2Vfj42FY

If you see the whole thing - please comment, would love to discuss

I watched/listened to this the other day! Pretty dense but entertaining, I'm going to listen to it again today. What did you take away from it?

Bonn1997 wrote:Ugh, WTF was Bill Clinton thinking with these Obamacare comments? Can't he at least wait 6 weeks to say things like this?

Bill Clinton always threw share in Obama's direction. I think Bill sees Obama as eclipsing his legacy a touch..I think Bill wants to be revered a bit more than he has been..Bill was pushing a healthcare plan too that didn't get light of day..I was listening to an interview last week and he kept going on about how Mayors and other legislators keep telling him about how great they are doing because of bills he passed or things he enacted. I'm not sure if anyone remembered much of what he has done..I think he wants a little love...

meloshouldgo wrote:

DrAlphaeus wrote:

meloshouldgo wrote:Mark Blyth breaks down the US economy and Global Trumpism - it's a long video worth every minute of it - plus he has the Scottish accent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkm2Vfj42FY

If you see the whole thing - please comment, would love to discuss

I watched/listened to this the other day! Pretty dense but entertaining, I'm going to listen to it again today. What did you take away from it?

The key message that I think people need to hear is that we'll paying jobs are not coming back, not now, not ever. The economy has already morphed into something people have not seen before. Increased taxation of the one percent and corporatons may be the most reasonable means of restoring stability.
Centrist politics is dead, people clinging on to hopes of it coming back to restore the good old days are basically subscribed into an irrational belief system. When you have an extreme left option it wins, when you don't you get trumped(sic).

His broader message is about how fukked EU and especially post Brexit UK is. And that the US will continue to borrow and continue ZIRP for the foreseeable future. He doesn't foresee a lot of turbulence for the US, just steadily flat or declining real wages and further polarization unless the population votes in a far left government.

Yea, sobering! and the idea that if Americans started saving instead of using credit that would make things worst. It's why I like the Green New Deal idea. We need both the jobs and the Internet/GPS type of gov. funded innovation before we get mired in a million jobs "self-driving" away in our economy's rear view mirror.

The pieces of the owner of the building collecting insurance money doe not makes sense, nor the wholesale slaughter of people who died.
The video simplifies the logic into a very compelling manner without the creepy drama music or ??????? often associated with such video's.
PLaya was a great fan of them.

The facts surrounding add up, but I never heard a good case as to whom benefited from it other than starting a nationalistic fervor to rattle the war sabre into action.

Knickoftime wrote:

Nalod wrote:Of all the theories, and over the years much is compelling in my view, never the reason of why?
Its a complex "Scheme" that I would figure many people would have known about it, and while some have died, nobody has blown the whistle from any credible perch.
The Plane into the pentagon was baffling as nobody saw it, and no video picked it up. And, that landing would have taken talent. Likewise the flight over Pennsylvania I guess was shot down, but why?
Also, this was all done to give us reason to go into Afghanistan?

The pieces of the owner of the building collecting insurance money doe not makes sense, nor the wholesale slaughter of people who died.
The video simplifies the logic into a very compelling manner without the creepy drama music or ??????? often associated with such video's.
PLaya was a great fan of them.

The facts surrounding add up, but I never heard a good case as to whom benefited from it other than starting a nationalistic fervor to rattle the war sabre into action.

The most obvious logical failing of Youtube-age conspiracy theories of course, is that they rack up millions of views on Youtube.

Think about that.

One is not open-minded and free of media influence if you cannot confront that simple conundrum.

Their common production values as you touch on should also be an intellectual red flag. They're all crafted using known tactics - music, pacing, narrative and rhetorical structure - to produce a specific response to a specific-minded person.

Yet, the people who don't recognize the manipulation involved are convinced they see through media manipulation.

The irony would be rich if it wasn't so disturbing.

Live is usually much more simpler and much more cynical that any conspiracy story.
And usually boooooring.... So why no to entertain the public with Snowman, Aliens, Sion Elders, Masons, etc.

Knickoftime wrote:

Nalod wrote:Of all the theories, and over the years much is compelling in my view, never the reason of why?
Its a complex "Scheme" that I would figure many people would have known about it, and while some have died, nobody has blown the whistle from any credible perch.
The Plane into the pentagon was baffling as nobody saw it, and no video picked it up. And, that landing would have taken talent. Likewise the flight over Pennsylvania I guess was shot down, but why?
Also, this was all done to give us reason to go into Afghanistan?

The pieces of the owner of the building collecting insurance money doe not makes sense, nor the wholesale slaughter of people who died.
The video simplifies the logic into a very compelling manner without the creepy drama music or ??????? often associated with such video's.
PLaya was a great fan of them.

The facts surrounding add up, but I never heard a good case as to whom benefited from it other than starting a nationalistic fervor to rattle the war sabre into action.

The most obvious logical failing of Youtube-age conspiracy theories of course, is that they rack up millions of views on Youtube.

Think about that.

One is not open-minded and free of media influence if you cannot confront that simple conundrum.

Their common production values as you touch on should also be an intellectual red flag. They're all crafted using known tactics - music, pacing, narrative and rhetorical structure - to produce a specific response to a specific-minded person.

Yet, the people who don't recognize the manipulation involved are convinced they see through media manipulation.

The irony would be rich if it wasn't so disturbing.

Dismissing everyone who says anything not supported in the mainstream media as a conspiracy theorist, is open minded? When you listen to your news on CNN, FOX or MSNBC how may intellectuals red flags do you see popping up?

meloshouldgo wrote:Well if you look at the war in Iraq does it answer your question? Trillions of dollars handed over to the military industrial complex because of the war started by the president of the United States perpetrating the greatest fraud this side of Watergate.

Well, no, it actually doesn't.

If you're going to go through the trouble of committing multiple homegrown secret terrorist attacks when one would likely have sufficed, why wouldn't you stage it as an act of the country you plan to invade, as opposed to a non-related terrorist group?

Was the assumption ignorant, uninformed people wouldn't understand the distinction part of the master plan?

meloshouldgo wrote:

Knickoftime wrote:

meloshouldgo wrote:Well if you look at the war in Iraq does it answer your question? Trillions of dollars handed over to the military industrial complex because of the war started by the president of the United States perpetrating the greatest fraud this side of Watergate.

Well, no, it actually doesn't.

If you're going to go through the trouble of committing multiple homegrown secret terrorist attacks when one would likely have sufficed, why wouldn't you stage it as an act of the country you plan to invade, as opposed to a non-related terrorist group?

Was the assumption ignorant, uninformed people wouldn't understand the distinction part of the master plan?

How on earth would I know the friggin master plan? If you stage it as an act of a single country you are grossly limiting your options and the country can deny it forcefully. But a terrorist group isn't equipped with the same level of counter propaganda machinery. Didn't the bat**** douchebag give some speech about the Axis of evil right after 9/11? One would suffice? No - It needed to be spectacular, mind numbing and something that would grip people's imagination for years to come.

Al-Qaeda had nothing to do with Iraq.

What the hell does Al-Qaeda committing a terrorist attack have to do with Iraq?

Why Are Politicians So Obsessed With Manufacturing?

When Donald J. Trump landed in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago, the city was buzzing about Uber’s deployment of the world’s first fleet of driverless taxicabs. Political leaders were thrilled that Silicon Valley was hiring highly paid workers and investing hundreds of millions of dollars in western Pennsylvania. Local taxi drivers were understandably less excited that robots were coming for their jobs.

Pittsburgh’s football team may still be called the Steelers, but the city has, like the rest of the country, become predominantly a service economy. More than 80 percent of local jobs are in the service sector, roughly on par with the national average. The largest private-sector employer is not U.S. Steel but the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The city’s jobs, however, increasingly are divided between a prospering college-educated elite of lawyers and doctors and bankers and a struggling mass of fast-food workers and security guards and nannies.

Uber’s arrival suggests those disparities are likely to intensify. The com­pany says it plans to create a total of 1,000 high-paying jobs at a Pittsburgh research center, presumably with the goal of eliminating the region’s 1,360 taxi-driving jobs. That may be a good deal, in the end, for the regional economy: Workers earning higher wages are also consumers who spend more money. But the trade-off would be little comfort to drivers, who are unlikely to move from that job to programming robots. And cabbies aren’t the only ones with cause for alarm. Self-driving vehicles presumably will also begin to replace the region’s 19,490 truck drivers and 9,390 bus drivers.

The Republican presidential nominee had not come to western Pennsylvania to talk about any of that. He looked out over his audience and promised, as he does at most of his rallies, that he would revive the American steel industry.

There’s nothing new about nostalgia in politics. American presidential candidates spent the better part of the 20th century promising to help family farmers in the face of urbanization. Now they promise to help factory workers in the face of globalization. Trump has made the revival of American manufacturing a signature issue, presenting his economic plan in an August speech in Detroit, the nation’s official postindustrial wasteland. Hillary Clinton has campaigned on a broader economic agenda, but when it came time to describe those plans, she chose a fac­tory outside Detroit as her backdrop.

The manufacturing boom of the postwar years was an oddity, and it isn’t coming back. But some of what made it vibrant could be reproduced for the service sector. Credit Illustration by Tim Enthoven
Manufacturing retains its powerful hold on the American imagination for good reason. In the years after World War II, factory work created a broadly shared prosperity that helped make the American middle class. People without college degrees could buy a home, raise a family, buy a station wagon, take some nice vacations. It makes perfect sense that voters would want to return to those times.

From an economic perspective, however, there can be no revival of American manufacturing, because there has been no collapse. Because of automation, there are far fewer jobs in factories. But the value of stuff made in America reached a record high in the first quarter of 2016, even after adjusting for inflation. The present moment, in other words, is the most productive in the nation’s history.

Politicians of all persuasions have tried to turn back time through a wide range of programs best summarized as “throwing money at factory owners.” They offer tax credits and other incentives; some towns even build whole industrial parks, at taxpayer expense, so they can offer free space for manufacturers. By and large, those strategies haven’t helped. One of Trump’s keynote proposals is to encourage domestic production by taxing imports — an idea more likely to cause a recession than a manufacturing revival. Clinton is promising to basically extend the efforts of the Obama administration, which said it would create a million factory jobs. With just a few months left, the president is still more than 600,000 jobs short.

This myopic focus on factory jobs distracts from another, simpler way to help working Americans: Improve the conditions of the work they actually do. Fast-food servers scrape by on minimum wage; contract workers are denied benefits; child-care providers have no paid leave to spend with their own children.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 64,000 steelworkers in America last year, and 820,000 home health aides — more than double the population of Pittsburgh. Next year, there will be fewer steelworkers and still more home health aides, as baby boomers fade into old age. Soon, we will be living in the United States of Home Health Aides, yet the candidates keep talking about steelworkers. Many home health aides live close to the poverty line: Average annual wages were just $22,870 last year. If both parties are willing to meddle with the marketplace in order to help one sector, why not do the same for jobs that currently exist?

Each candidate has walked down this road, Clinton significantly farther than Trump. He has suggested he might support a $10 federal minimum wage, and he has proposed new tax benefits to reduce the cost of child care. She has backed a $12 minimum wage and more generous tax benefits for child care. She has also promised to support paid leave and increased protection for unions. In August 2015, she met with a group of home health care workers in Los Angeles, and returned to the issue in her Detroit speech. “The people taking care of our children and our parents, they deserve a good wage, good benefits, and a secure retirement,” she said. But no one is basing an entire presi­dential campaign around ideas like this.

Service work is different from factory work, and unions have struggled to organize its laborers.
The manufacturing boom of the postwar years was an oddity, and there will be no repeat of the concatenation that made it happen: The backlog of innovations stored up during the Great Depression and World War II; the devastation of other industrial powers, Germany in particular, which gave the United States a competitive edge. Yet some parts of the formula that created the middle class may be possible to replicate. Unions played a large role in negotiating favorable work rules, many of which have since entered into law. Stronger unions — or federal regulators, who have increasingly replaced unions as the primary advocates for workers — could improve conditions in the service sector, too.

The enduring political focus on factory workers partly reflects the low profile of the new working class. Instead of white men who make stuff, the group is increasingly made up of minority women who serve people. “That transformation really has rendered the working class invisible,” says Tamara Draut, the author of “Sleeping Giant,” a recent book about this demographic transformation and its political consequences.

The old working class still controls the megaphone of the labor movement, in part because unions have struggled to organize service workers. Manufacturing was, logistically speaking, easier to organize. There were lots of workers at each factory, and most knew one another. Service work is more dispersed and done in smaller crews. Workers living in the same city and employed by the same retail chain, for example, would likely know only a handful of their compatriots. Fostering a sense of trust and shared purpose under these conditions is difficult.

At the same time, more and more men are plopping down on the sidelines of the economy. The Harvard economist Lawrence H. Summers estimates that by midcentury, one-third of men in their prime working years, between the ages of 25 and 54, will not be working. Politicians are paying attention to them perhaps because they’ve demonstrated a willingness to switch parties. David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., says in a recent paper he helped write that voting patterns have been disrupted in the parts of the country that lost the most jobs to trade with China. The study, which focused on congressional elections, found that voters in those areas have tended toward ideological extremes. In predominantly non-Hispanic white districts, voters have tended to install conservatives in place of moderates.

This is a dynamic that Trump, in particular, has capitalized on. “People are tired of lies, they’re tired of losing their jobs, they’re tired of seeing their companies being ripped out and going to other places,” he said at a rally in Erie, Pa. “That’s why the steelworkers are with me, that’s why the miners are with me, that’s why the working people, electricians, the plumbers, the Sheetrockers, the concrete guys and gals, they’re all — they’re with us.”

In all likelihood, many more of Mr. Trump’s supporters are people who once worked in those kinds of jobs, or whose parents did. They are now caregivers, retail workers and customer-service representatives. When will they start to demand that candidates address the lives they actually lead?

Binyamin Appelbaum is an economics reporter for The Times.