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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
As a Venezuelan(a country who have been fuck over by populist who clearly dosent have any idea of politics) I will said, the US in the same path as my home, they where charmed by pretty words and a clown act and sadly, america fail for it.
In short, in a weird twist of fate, now the country now have the typical latin american president.....which is really depressing.
edited 9th Nov '16 10:36:07 AM by unknowing
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"Deadspin is alternating from this:
to these:
We know that we live in an age of staggering economic inequality. The top 10% of earners now take in nearly half of all our national income, a portion that has been rising steadily since the Reagan era. Meanwhile, the average income of the bottom 90% has scarcely risen at all during that same period. In this regard, the United States is nearly the most unequal developed nation in the world. When inequality gets this severe, dramatic things start to happen. Revolutions, wars, violent nationalism, instability, the rise of people like Donald Trump—all of these things are in line with what history tells us is in store if we do not reverse the direction of inequality in this country.
Think for a moment about the realistic options for reversing these decades-long trends. The wealthy will obviously not voluntarily surrender their gains. That means there are only two ways to begin putting a larger share of earnings in the pockets of the poor and middle class: The government can take measures to make it happen, like raising taxes on the wealthy, more stringently regulating the financial industry, and strengthening the social safety net; or, lower and middle class workers can assert their own power to claim a larger share of the pie.
I am all for the government taking measures to tax the rich and fund the poor and generally strike blows against the excesses of our system of capitalism. And I suspect that our laws will move in that direction in the very long term, out of necessity. But I do not recommend holding your breath waiting for that to happen. Since the problem is pressing, that means that it is up to the people themselves to do what they can to make our nation’s economy more fair.
There is only one meaningful way for regular workers to do this: unions. Studies have shown that union members earn wages that are significantly higher than non-members—10% to 20% is a reasonable estimate of this “union wage premium.” Furthermore, industries that have high union density see wages rise even for workers who are not in unions. This is all, if you give it a moment’s thought, common sense. Unions enable the majority (workers) to assert their bargaining power. Employers may be able to push wages down against individuals, but they cannot forever push wages down against workers who are organized as a group; ultimately, employers need employees in order to exist.
Even though unions are the best tool that normal people have for getting a fairer income, they have been on the decline during the same time period that inequality has been on the rise. This is not a coincidence. In the 1950s, American union membership peaked, with more than one in three workers in a union. Today, only one in nine American workers are in a union; if you take away public sector workers, that rate falls to less than 7%. Here is a picture of the union membership trend since our modern era of inequality began in earnest: (Via CEPR)
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This is inequality writ large. Increasing this labor share of income is, broadly speaking, what it would mean to decrease inequality. It would mean more money for workers and a smaller share for the richest slice of people who live off of capital. By one estimate, the decrease in labor share of income over the past 15 years has cost regular workers $535 billion.
Workers who are not unionized are leaving money on the table. Because they lack the ability to bargain collectively, they are getting paid thousands of dollars per year less than they could be. Where are those thousands of dollars per year going instead? Into the pockets of executives and investors. And so inequality grows. Simply by unionizing, you can put that money back into your own pocket. Add ten or 20 or 30 million new members into union ranks and you will see the long climb of inequality turn around. This is the tantalizing promise of what can be accomplished if we can significantly increase union membership in America.
Union membership is an idea that is so obviously beneficial to workers that they will embrace it when they are given an honest opportunity to do so. It sells itself. Yes, there has been a great deal of anti-union propaganda since the Reagan era, but that can be dispelled with simple facts, if organized labor cares to take the time to do it. The great advantage of unions as the solution to inequality is that they are not as susceptible to being crushed by a flood of opposition money as politicians are. The rich can influence Congress a great deal with super PA Cs, but there is a limit to the quality of lies that corporations can tell about why an employee should not take a simple step that will surely benefit them financially for years to come.
So all we need to do is to get busy organizing those tens of millions of new union members. Right? Unfortunately, organized labor has to a large extent allowed itself to be wooed into prioritizing electoral politics over new organizing. (This very dispute over priorities caused a major rift in the union world ten years ago, leading several big unions to leave the AFL-CIO and form their own coalition called Change to Win, focused more on organizing.) Labor unions have spent more than $100 million already on the 2016 presidential election campaign, more than double what they spent in 2008. While there can be no doubt that Democratic presidents are a worthwhile investment for unions, it is worth asking whether unions have allowed themselves to get trapped in political quicksand, as an increasingly small share of workers spend an increasingly large amount of money in a desperate effort to stave off what they perceive as political doom. Electing Democrats is a recipe for stasis, not progress, and union membership numbers bear this out. (Electing Republicans is a recipe for faster decline.) The Democratic Party will be happy to take and more and more money from unions, unto infinity. But unless unions can start adding instead of losing members, that spending trend will eventually hit a wall.
In 1956, the AFL-CIO, America’s biggest union coalition, had about 13 million members. The population of the country at that time was 169 million. Fifty years later, when our population had grown to almost 300 million, the AFL-CIO had... about 13 million members. That tells you everything you need to know about the failure of organized labor to do what it is always supposed to be doing: organize.
We can blame Republicans and their “right to work” laws, we can blame the inertia of unions themselves, or we can blame the distracted American public. It doesn’t matter. The point is that unions need to add a lot of new members. The long-term downward trend of union membership needs to start going up. If we are serious about turning around economic inequality, this needs to start happening fast, because we can be sure that all of the other realistic solutions will only happen slowly. If we are not serious about turning around economic inequality, we will see other social and political changes happening that we will not like one bit. More than forty percent of Americans appear willing to cast their votes for “burn it all down.” Four more years of the same trends will only increase this tendency.
Organizing new members must be the top priority not just of unions themselves, but also of the entire left-wing political activist structure that exists to fight social ills. Most of those ills—poverty, disenfranchisement, lack of social mobility—spring from the very inequality that a vast increase in worker power is capable of turning around. Organized labor should direct its money and resources into adding new members, and other liberal groups should pick up their slack in political donations. Do they need to organize more low-wage workers? Yes. Do they need to organize more white collar workers? Yes. Do they need to build on existing union strength in friendly states? Yes. Do they need to do the hard work of building a presence in union-unfriendly states? Yes. Do they need to break into new industries like tech where unions have little presence? Yes. And speaking of tech, do they need to figure out how to bring a whole generation of young workers into unions even though they have little connection with or affinity for the withered husk of organized labor? Yes. Is all of this easier said than done? Of course. It’s not easy. It’s necessary.
Unionizing new industries and new workers can no longer be seen as a happy rarity; it must be an urgent priority. It must happen because there is no other good option. We are living in the midst of a generation that has never gotten a meaningful raise, a generation in which it is no longer assumed that your standard of living will be better than that of your parents. A check for hundreds of billions of dollars, made out to The Average American Worker, is sitting on the table. The only way to pick it up is to make unions strong enough that they are a broad-based national force to be reckoned with, rather than a special interest. That means hundreds of thousands of new members per year, at minimum. Unions must set aside petty grievances and rivalries and work like single-minded maniacs with one extremely important task: Turning around decades of inequality by making the working class strong once again.
Organize. Or eat your crumbs as the world burns.
Periodically throughout our nation’s history, we have been grasped by major social and political movements that thrust us forward—or backwards. There will always be political disagreements, and social and political activism, but in certain times these things burrow so deeply into the fiber of our society that an entire era is defined by them. The civil rights movement and the all-encompassing activism of the 1960s and 70s is the most recent example. That’s the most familiar to those alive today, but here have been others: the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Gilded Age that fueled the Progressive era that built America’s safety net. There is nothing in the rule book of fate that dictates that these periods of collective upheaval have to end happily. But they are perhaps the only things capable of thoroughly reshaping a large, diverse, contentious nation in a thorough way.
It’s time for a new movement. A deep and broad movement that surpasses the 90s “culture wars” and the (ultimately futile) liberal reaction to the War on Terror. It can be hard to put your finger on exactly what you fear most about the rise of Donald Trump: the racism? The sexism? The xenophobia? The profoundly dangerous lack of judgment? We fear all of these things. What this movement will ultimately unite against, though, is the rise of an American strongman. We Americans have always fancied ourselves to be superior to the banana republics and quasi-dictatorships that we often helped create; now, we are offered a chance to prove it. If we do not wish to be the sort of nation that allows itself to be run by a strongman, then the movement starts now.
Everyone and everything threatened by Trumpism must be a part of this movement. We need a drawing-together of the many constituencies who are, today, wondering whether this country is a place for them. Fortunately, there are certain areas in which movements are already strong and cohesive: Against racism, we have Black Lives Matter and an entire superstructure of organizations built up over the decades of the civil rights movement that work to try to extend those gains bit by bit; against climate change, we have a fairly coherent global movement, though it is dependent on cooperation from governments. Many other groups that awoke to an existential threat today will have to gird themselves for the sort of fight that they may have hoped had receded into the past. The women’s movement, which faces the structural challenge that accompanies trying to organize a group encompassing half the country’s population, will need to get on war footing fast; those of us who value the First Amendment—writers, artists, journalists, entertainers, academics, activists—will need to prepare for challenges that would have seemed unthinkable one year ago; immigrant and Muslim groups must be embraced and strengthened enough to make them formidable political powers; organized labor must find a way to make itself a force to be reckoned with once again.
Consider all of the issues that faced America yesterday. The issues that take far more than a human lifetime to solve. The police shootings and structural racism and sexism and inequality. Now consider the fact that for at least four years, we will face a harder environment for making progress on these issues, which proved extremely hard to manage during the past eight years of what could well prove to be the most enlightened president of a generation, or a lifetime. All of things that have been torturing our nation during the reign of a progressive president and a strong economy are now probably more difficult to solve. The past couple of years—with all of the riots and mass shootings and national enmity—were, in retrospect, as good as it will get. At least for a while.
Nobody knows what Donald Trump will do. If he does what he says he will do, it will be awful; if he does something else, it will be terrifying. This is the time when the cosmopolitans bandy about the idea of fleeing the country, and everyone else unfortunate enough to feel threatened by Trump’s victory suffers through terror, resentment, anger, and apathy. The first step for us now it to recognize that all of us are in the same boat. It will take all of us come together to oppose the rise of an American strongman who has shown himself to care little for the fortunes or rights of a large portion of America and the world. We all have our own specific interests, and our own pet causes, and our own issues that worry us most. But every single constituency that now feels themselves at risk must cast their gaze outwards, and see the millions of others feeling the same way for different reasons. This issue is bigger than the Democratic party, or “the left,” or any particular demographic. To fight Trumpism as a hundred different factions is to lose. This is an American fight, and it calls for an American movement. The new age of Trump must be opposed simultaneously on every front, and every group fighting in every area must be supported by everyone else. The fights against Trump’s racism, and his xenophobia, and his attacks on women’s rights, and his foreign policy bluster, and his policies that will worsen economic inequality, and his threats against the First Amendment are not separate fights. They are all the same one. You can jump in anywhere and start helping anywhere. That’s what makes a movement go.
Don’t move to Canada. Reach out a hand to someone who is scared today and say that you will stand with them. Once a hundred million of us do that, we have a coalition that is stronger than one small man who has gained control of a very big office. Your kids can grow up in Trump’s America, or they can grow up in the America that opposed Trump. It’s time to get to work.
EDIT: Basically Japan may be forced into Teeth-Clenched Teamwork with South Korea in order for both to survive. At best.
edited 9th Nov '16 10:37:45 AM by Krieger22
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot![]()
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North Korea or something. Japan is also in some troubles right now.
edited 9th Nov '16 10:37:14 AM by RAlexa21th
Continue writing our story of peace.Traditionally Republican states going to Trump, that was to be expected. I would have liked to have seen more of a Never Trump movement, but it is what it is.
The swing states going to Trump? Well, a swing state, by definition, is a state that can go either way.
But Pennsylvania? Wisconsin? Michigan?
What the hell happened there?
The Pence stuff is the only thing I've heard of.
I'm sure as the Trump presidency closes in we'll hear more.
edited 9th Nov '16 10:39:19 AM by Draghinazzo
edited 9th Nov '16 10:42:56 AM by Bense
edited 9th Nov '16 10:43:42 AM by Krieger22
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiotAnd it was music to the ears of people in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—the Brexit states. If you live here in Ohio, you know what I’m talking about. Whether Trump means it or not is kind of irrelevant, because he’s saying the things to people who are hurting. And it’s why every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves Trump. He is the human Molotov cocktail that they’ve been waiting for, the human hand grenade that they can legally throw into the system that stole their lives from them.
And on November 8th, Election Day, although they’ve lost their jobs, although they’ve been foreclosed on by the bank—next came the divorce, and now the wife and kids are gone, the car has been repoed, they haven’t had a real vacation in years, they’re stuck with the [bleep] Obamacare Bronze Plan, where you can’t even get a [bleep] Percocet—they’ve essentially lost everything they had—except one thing, the one thing that doesn’t cost them a cent and is guaranteed to them by the American Constitution: the right to vote. They might be penniless, they might be homeless, they might be [bleep] over and [bleep] up. It doesn’t matter, because it’s equalized on that day. A millionaire has the same number of votes as the person without a job: one. And there’s more of the former middle class than there are in the millionaire class.
So, on November 8th, the dispossessed will walk into the voting booth, be handed a ballot, close the curtain and take that lever, or felt pen or touchscreen, and put a big [bleep] X in the box by the name of the man who has threatened to upend and overturn the very system that has ruined their lives: Donald J. Trump. They see that the elites who ruined their lives hate Trump. Corporate America hates Trump. Wall Street hates Trump. The career politicians hate Trump. The media hates Trump—after they loved him and created him, and now hate him. Thank you, media. The enemy of my enemy is who I’m voting for on November 8th. Yes, on November 8th, you, Joe Blow, Steve Blow, Bob Blow, Billy Blow, Billy Bob Blow—all the Blows get to go and blow up the whole goddamn system, because it’s your right. Trump’s election is going to be the biggest "[bleep] you" ever recorded in human history.
And it will feel good—for a day, yeah, maybe a week, possibly a month. And then, like the Brits, who wanted to send a message, so they voted to leave Europe, only to find out that if you vote to leave Europe, you actually have to leave Europe. And now they regret it. All the Ohioans, Pennsylvanians, Michiganders and Wisconsinites of Middle England—right?—they all voted to leave, and now they regret it, and over 4 million of them have signed a petition to have a do-over. They want another election. It ain’t gonna happen, because you used the ballot as an anger management tool. And now you’re [bleep]. And the rest of Europe? The rest of Europe? They’re like, "Bye, Felicia."
So, when the rightfully angry people of Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin find out after a few months in office that President Trump wasn’t going to do a damn thing for them, it will be too late to do anything about it. But I get it. You wanted to send a message. You had righteous anger and justifiable anger. Well, message sent. Good night, America. You’ve just elected the last president of the United States.
edited 9th Nov '16 10:44:27 AM by Eschaton
@Bense: your "I'm in a small state. Without the Elrctoral college, my vite wouldn't matter" means you're still thinking at state level, but without the electoral college, there wouldn't be a need to. Everyone's vote would be equal in electing the President, because the votes would not be divided by state. The concept of state wouldn't enter the equation at all.
"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."@Bense: I'm arguing that the Electoral College is outdated and not conducive to democracy. I think we had this argument before; you claimed something about state's rights and I argued back that voting is an individual's right, not a state right. The Electoral college inherently gives weight to certain states. The fact that winner takes all is a thing in the college makes it worse.
Tell me you wouldn't have a problem with that if Clinton had been the winner.
edited 9th Nov '16 10:51:29 AM by AceofSpades
"Like, I'm not sure every rural white Trump appealed to was a card-carrying clansman or white supremacist."
I think the main problem is that the Trump supporters, who turned out to be more like American Dursleys than rural, poor whites, simply don't care either way. If there's a Klansman in office - if, say, David Duke himself was elected — do you really think any of these paranoid Little America types are going to give a wet shit whether blacks suffer, whether gays suffer, or Latinos, or the next generation? Of course not; the world ends at their picket fence.
I mean, the Thermidorian reaction of this election is not anything new — the abolition of slavery was followed by Jim Crow. What's new is that the usual excuses have, one by one, disappeared. The people that brought Trump into office either view the liberal coalition as subhuman, or simply don't care.
edited 9th Nov '16 10:53:40 AM by CrimsonZephyr
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."Let me put it this way: trump voter base are consisted of two people: the racist who just want their country white again like the roten spoiled child they are and the delusional who truly believe Trump is the anti-establishment messiah send to slay the awfull dragon-Hilary.
the former dosent care about the country, they just want to feel good and the other are to much caught in the lies to actually see they have been screw by orange con-man
And now, all people will suffer for it
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"

Political science majors will have a very busy 4 years trying to make sense out of this mess.
Inter arma enim silent leges