Commercial and industrial loans are up this year though by less than last year. But that's not surprising with the fed issuing guidance that rates are rising and stepping down from quant easing.

Pretty thorough report at the Daily Beast about the rise in U.S. caused civilian casualties since Trump took office. Sad stuff.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/preside...ilians-per-day

The article also presents some military guys who are thrilled to be unshackled* in fighting terrorists. Not sure how you can look at the rise of ISIS and think that blowing up hundreds of civilians is the right path to ending global terror, but OK.

* For example,

Two guys!

Yeltsin hired some experienced campaign managers, because none had existed in russia at the time. You could look at american government help both ways, as helping to hold a fair election, or heavily tipping the scales towards the incumbent by loaning him some actual political advice. Fact of the matter is yeltsin was actually willing to give democracy a try, which got him elected the first time and was somewhat novel for that country. He was basically ahead by virtue of being within parameters of what any western democracy can support. If you are Yeltsin, you probably say all the right things to all the ambassadors at the time too, hoping for any and all help.

Somehow what Russia is doing now is different. They are stoking nationalism and hoping the west just burns down itself.

It's actually an interesting tidbit of intel. He didn't just come up with that, he's referencing something that was said to him, probably by the establishment in the form of mike pence. They are starting to talk to him like a baby.

This particular bot's ai went a little nuts. I wonder which one of your posts broke it.

Gotta give Bannon props for his accurate description of Ryan.

https://twitter.com/TVietor08/status/887174411500912641

Hurricane Don, small and not well organized.
https://twitter.com/AP_Politics/stat...00059728347137

Megyn Kelly ratings hit new low as she once again loses to rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos https://t.co/0A7bqgl4cu https://t.co/V8ZQXmhCsh

I always thought Kelly was a shill with no personality. Doesn't seem to work as well outside the Fox bubble.

Maybe her and Greta could start a podcast or something, could call it "Outfoxed".

This feels like an attempt to scare senators that they will actually be put on the record after demanding repeal for eight years.

I doubt it will ever come to a vote but instead used to try and get their healthcare back on track. I think both will fail.

But the pressure needs to stay high.

That they are pushing so hard for something people actually don’t want is significant. People bought into their obstructionist repeal rhetoric for a while but that is dead and gone now. The percentage of Americans who still want straight appeal is tiny, so I don’t think it will be an effective tool to pressure people into supporting the BCRA.

I think taking a straight repeal vote would be a disaster for the GOP and perhaps the end of McConnell.

I get the impression that, aside from Mattis and maybe McMaster, the entire Trump WH & cabinet are just actors playing the role of government employees.

Someone please tell me I'm wrong. Someone else tell me there's no fraud case to be made against this Hollywood government.

Add the GOP to the list of phonies. They are trying to defund and eliminate the agency in charge of fair voting in elections, because the agency is looking into what happened last year. #1 GOP is guilty as **** and deeply involved with TrumpRussia, and #2 If they get their way here, we are FINISHED as a country.

https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/sta...06659033784320

Oops, another damning connection between the Trump campaign and this Russian "adoptions" lawyer they claimed to know nothing about. Trump's Florida campaign chair's hubby is the person who reserved her front row seating at a Congressional hearing when she doesn't even speak English. To make matters worse, check out that photo (it's been posted before I think) of her sitting at the hearing, cell phone in hand, apparently taking pics of the Ambassador's laptop while he testifies.

https://twitter.com/ABCPolitics/stat...56586657058816

The bolded seem like the important claims here. There's a lot hinging on what you slipped in there.

What I'm hearing is: New Deal politics were bad and failed as prima facie, but there's a lot riding on the conclusion there. Did they inhibit growth? Hey, maybe? They valued equality of distribution as a priority instead. I have said my piece lately about romanticized nostalgia for the era but the United States and Europe were able to beat back the forces of socialist and revolutionary and extremist appeals with precisely the policies you're describing as failed.

Needless to say the solutions hearken back to older solutions but yet again we're confronted with an actual sort of old problem, where wealth is increasingly stratified, the middle class is feeling significant downward pressures on their labor value, the wages of segregation and inequality fomenting the old public passions. It's not a bad idea to go back to the past and determine how prior generations dealt with the problem.

Which brings up the important point: I'm not sure what we're comparing the failures to, either. The unquestioned successes of the last 30 years? I grant cheap technology abounds and lots of Chinese, Indians and others from southeast Asia have been rescued from abject poverty but OTOH look what they've done in Europe and the US: the rise of an angry populist response which seeks to undermine the global liberal order we sort of cherish, which empowers a narcissistic authoritarian sociopaths like Trump to power. Insert The Road "for the last time, son, there were emails" jpg meme with "for the last time, son, there was a 90% marginal top rate!" as we all flee America's cities irritated from nuclear war brought about by nascent authoritarian movements and we have to re-explain to our children the utter misery and failures of the total failures of New Deal politics.

At least we confront the problem. Say what you will about how mean FlyWf is to white guys on the internet, how disdainful we are of the teeming masses of angry whites trying to turn America into a walled fortress and unleash the cops on black people, but least we ultimately recognize the solution isn't the status quo. You had a funny quip about how the neoliberal globalist new Clintonian triangulocentrist stab-in-the-back Democratic party elite politics, but it was at least a movement that had ideas about how to respond to the manifest inadequacy of socialism, but what's the bobman/max/neoliberal solution to the manifest inadequacy of the status quo?

Second, and as others mentioned, the "popular rejection" of those policies only arrived when the right tied them civil rights and painted the picture they were extravagances being lavished on black people. Taxing the wealthy and corporations remains incredibly popular. Dirigiste investment schemes in things like mass transit remain popular, up until right-wing infotainers remind them black people might get on the mass transit and start roaming where they don't belong, and the public appetite wanes. The mocking sarcastic part of me might now make yet more hand-waving gestures back to the New Deal Era and and praise the champions of unfettered capitalism that rolled back media and public decency regulations, now we have Rush Limbaugh and scads of right-wing infotainers, thank goodness for invisible hand provided there. But that's a digression.

Lastly, in a later point you suggested that what we're (and by we, I think you mean the neoliberal movement) suffering from is a failure of political entrepreneurship, not policy entrepreneurship, then pointed to how Matt Ygelsias is a personal hero because he has all these great ideas to sell to the public which were really just Ted Talk marketing metaphors about urban centers as engines of economic progress and opportunity. Which I think is supposed to stand in contrast with all the simpleton left ideas like raise the minimum wage and rent controls, I mean where are our white papers and podcasts and think-pieces and explainers, huh? Yet again I feel like it's the left that actually learned the lesson and accounted for new information here. Upon witnessing the right-wing accumulate more power and culminate it in the deeply wonky technocratic "we'll build the wall and make Mexico pay for it" and promising to Repeal ObamaCare Death Panels, I wonder aloud if you got the exact right diagnosis (suffering from a failure political entrepreneurship) and the most self-evidently contradictory treatment plan that will simply further the disease (more Ygeslias!).

Simplicity is a feature. Simple stories and narratives with a few clearly articulated principles is superior than inundating the public with policy details. Getting back to the New Deal, FDR sold America on simple stories with little details: Relief, Recovery, and Reform and a New Deal for the American people. When Alf Landon portrayed FDR as an elitist proto-socialist, he didn't respond with a lecture to people about the necessity of the Federal Crop Insurance and Drought Relief Service and the Soil Conservation Service because the demand for commodity crops produced overcultivation of marginal arid land. He simply communicated some simple principles about helping common people, emoted about the Dust Bowl, laid out some very broad policy outlines with almost comically little detail. All the actual technocractic wonkery happened elsewhere. It's not a virtue to need an explainer, policy details are pedantry for most people, and Matt Yglesias IS the political entrepreneurship failure. I think what the left has collectively learned over the past 10 years is NOT to fall down that rabbit hole, and that's what the populist right and Trump has demonstrated as well. What you're championing is actually bad politics; what you're criticizing (lol all this simplicity, it will never work!) is a virtue. Obviously between us chickens in the roost here, lots of this stuff is simply blue sky fantasies. Bear in mind significant amounts of people voted for a guy because he promised to build a 50 ft tall border wall. Fantasies and shared fictions we know aren't practical are how normal people commiserate and signal shared desires, it's actually an effective communication strategy. Most people aren't greatly desirous for a bunch of pedantry and details. The left does well by disabusing their need for detailed policy roll-outs and instead pivot to more broadly emotional appeals that simply rely on principles to tell the story.

Well, I think you let the veil slip here that it's hard to articulate the principled thing they're doing wrong on the simple fact that they're interfering. The criticism is entirely tied to the outcome.

I'll say it again: Russia has millions of American co-conspirators hoping to burn the world down, who hate the status quo, that are furious about immigration, black people, Kaepernick, transgender people, Muslims. You name it, they're furious about it. It's time to confront that because once we acknowledge it, Russia's wrongdoing here takes a turn from obviously wrong to simply symptomatic of a larger problem. It's still wrong and criminal but they're just accomplices and now the crime is like tens of millions of Americans wanting authoritarian and ethno nationalist solutions and disdaining the global liberal order. We can't export all of that emotion as a Putin creation.

Late 18th and even early 19th century capitalist thinking was pretty far afield from its modern progeny.

They wanted to break up aristocratic monopolies. Early classical economists wrote about the terrors of debt peonage, and fretted about how wage laborers could ever acquire enough capital and wealth to leave the laboring class. They worried about the unequal power of people who had capital and labor and how they could ever negotiate equally.

In fact, guess the author of these quotes!:

Hot damn at this last one, this guy speaks ****ing fire about the collusion of capitalists, the plight of the worker, he must be some sort of degenerate radical.

So, who wrote this stuff?

Hints:

- not PolPot
- not einbert
- not Marx



The notion that you and he are talking about the same things and "what worked well for poor people" is entirely dubious. Metric ****tons of the things today's free market orthodox types talk about were offensive to pre-Industrial capitalists, they were things they actively worried about, they thought capitalism solved. Half of the yarns that pre-industrial capitalist wrote talked about using gasp, heaven forfend STATE AUTHORITY to open up markets to competition and how those forces would undermine aristocrats and accumulated wealth and liberate workers and the poor.

So USA economic system is:

[ ] Highly Successful
[ ] Somewhat Successful
[ ] Meh
[ ] Somewhat Unsuccessful
[ ] Highly Unsuccessful

Consider poverty rates, quality of life, economic opportunities.

Somewhat successful.

Amazing how Trump supporters take on his personality by supporting him. They're him without the money or power.

Sent from my SM-T560 using Tapatalk

Right.

I've been reading adios's posts for 10+ years, he hasn't changed a bit. He was the OG Trump. Trump has borrowed as much from the right as he has set the tone. Remember Trump is basically just an amalgamation of his favorite Fox News personalities, which themselves are just cos-playing volkish character tropes.

This is ridiculous. Why is there "too much" money involved? It is a profitable business and so the people that are in it get paid.

1) Again, this is a claim that requires some evidence.
2) Overpaying the CEO harms the shareholders, not really anybody else.
3) I agree with you about the living wage part, but you fix that by requiring the company to pay those people more (i.e. minimum wage laws) not by putting some arbitrary cap on the CEO's pay.

It is gibberish because it does not make sense.

Yes.

fyp

I'm in charge, but just let it fail.



https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/...80380423938048