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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Not that this was ever a big factor in its implementation or rejection. Only 18-29 year olds on the Internet really cared about that part. And, as I said earlier, 18-29 year olds on the Internet generally don't vote (speaking as a 18-29 year old on the Internet here). The important part was facilitating trade between various Asia-Pacific countries, which was projected to result in a net economic gain, particularly for the poorer members of the partnership like Vietnam.
Unfortunately it seems like Trump will wreck much of his legacy.
edited 14th Nov '16 6:35:54 PM by MonsieurThenardier
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."I'm not seeing a problem here.
edited 14th Nov '16 6:44:21 PM by MonsieurThenardier
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."![]()
Why exactly should we be passing the TPP though?
Trade deals aren't magical, despite what neoliberals try to assert; yes there's some marginal economic gains, but tarries are already low enough that it barely makes a difference on that front. A lot of jobs end up being shifted around though, and while the net change in available jobs is close to zero, spoiler warning: particularly stateside, a lot of people really don't like losing their jobs to outsourcing, and while it was assumed these people would retrain and find comparable jobs, this doesn't appear to be happening anywhere close to the rate prominent neoliberal economists projected it would.
It's not apocalyptic, but neither is it a panacea, and passing more trade deals will almost certainly exasperate the backlash against globalism that is sweeping through the west. That's not even getting in to the IP provisions, which I find quite odious, and will do quite a bit to stifle innovation.
edited 14th Nov '16 6:55:28 PM by CaptainCapsase
Millions of Vietnamese peasants are screwed in that case, but you know. Neither the far right nor the far left care about that.
I also like how you're referring to them as "neo-liberal economists", rather than just "economists". Free trade being good is the consensus among actual professionals. It has been for quite a while. The objections we're hearing to globalism today are the exact same ones being raised in the 19th century.
edited 14th Nov '16 7:04:33 PM by MonsieurThenardier
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."![]()
Yeah. A lot of people here are optimistic about President Obama's legacy, I have a bad feeling he'll end up associated with whatever woes a Trump presidency brings, having handed him a greatly empowered executive branch and a massive surveillance state that he not only did not dismantle in the wake of the Bush era, but expanded, and which will now be turned against the democrats.
Neoliberal economists being the ones who try to pretend free trade is magical and has no negative or potentially unwanted consequences depending on the circumstances. Yes there's a net gain in wealth, but it's fairly small compared to the number of workers who need to find new jobs (even though the number of jobs remains the same, being displaced isn't fun), and virtually nonexistent for particular sectors of the working class, and its these same people, the losers of globalization, who are pushing the far right into power.
As far as the comparison to industrialization, it's an apt one, because much of the insanity of the late 19th and early 20th century has its roots in the breakdown of traditional society caused by the industrial revolution. I would hope people would be intelligent enough not to repeat history, but "history repeats" is an extremely common adage for the same reason "common sense" is a buzzword.
My opinion on this matter is fairly similar to the one expressed by Paul Kruggman
; I just don't feel like the TPP is really worth it.
edited 14th Nov '16 7:11:10 PM by CaptainCapsase
Anti-Clinton investigations will just be seen as poor sportsmanship at this point. When there was a chance for her to be President, you could at least argue that it made good sense to subject her to scrutiny. Now that her career is over, dragging her back is just cruel.
Not a value statement, mind, i'm thinking how it will play with the general public. We're tired of hearing about the damn emails and that is *especially* true if they're the emails of private citizen Hillary Clinton. If the committees are thinking to use her scandals to distract from Trump...
So Breitbart is basically going to become the US Russia Today?
Lovely.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.Something tells me that Hillary Clinton is never going to know any peace until a majority of Americans unsubscribe from cable and stop watching mainstream news, the great enabler of all these 'scandals' that have hounded her. Ratings at any cost, apparently. The price we pay for letting Fox and the would-be centrists monkey with people's heads for decades without a compelling counterbalance.
Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.Social movements can and do influence change because they are issues that affect people's lives on an intimate level. People can't let them go because they are constantly hurt by them. Feminism gained power because the issues it was fighting against were constantly relevant to someone's life, every single second of every day. There was a steady flow of people passionate about the issue because there was always someone being harmed by it.
The same is true of the Civil Rights Movement. Rosa Parks didn't sit on that bus because she heard about some black people being hurt three years ago. She did it because she was actively suffering under an unjust system that was making new victims every moment.
The Electoral College doesn't have that omnipresence. It only matters one time every four years and more often than not it goes unnoticed during that time. People who are upset about it today are not going to be able to retain that frustration for four straight years. Outrage just doesn't last that long. Without constant booster shots of injustice, the rage burns out. People stop caring.
Go ahead and have your "End the EC!" rallies if you want, but don't be surprised as attendance flickers out and dies because people in 2017 have more pressing matters on their plate than some logistical mumbo-jumbo they only ever half-understood in the first place.
It matters because so long as the only reason anyone stops to care about the EC is because they lost, then we will always be in a position where the only people who care about the EC are the ones with no power to change it.
Until the day that it's the people who won the EC calling it bullshit, nothing's ever going to happen.
Sure. And if the Republicans were wailing because the EC had cost them the White House, they would be howling into an abyss with no power to change it just like the Democrats are doing now.
The losing side doesn't get to create or abolish laws in order to secure a victory next time. Only the winners do.
Which means we need Congress to agree with the idea. And most of them are not Democrats. Now, if most of them dislike Trump, there's a far bigger chance of that working. Since their bias can help swap the final decision of getting rid of it or not.
We would also need a President willing to sign into law the bill that undermines his or her Presidency. Or enough of a supermajority in Congress that we can override a veto.
Exactly. And when Obama won the electoral vote and the popular vote, eight years had passed since George W. Bush slid into office with an electoral win but losing the popular vote - just like Trump has done here. Eight years later, everyone had long since forgotten that they were outraged against the EC.
Because you don't get new reasons to be angry every other day with election law.
edited 14th Nov '16 8:24:23 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Commie plots. America is "the land of the free". We don't like the word "compulsory".
You could have "compulsory breathing" or "compulsory playing with kittens" or "compulsory getting to have sex with your favorite celebrity" and Americans would still ravenously oppose it.
The thing about the U.S. is that much of our politics have nothing to do with actual issues and everything to do with the Myth of America. We make decisions based not on the benefits a thing would provide to us but on how it interacts with our view of what the nation's soul.
edited 14th Nov '16 8:44:32 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.

Stuff like this is exactly why President Obama has been criticized as being a corporatist.
edited 14th Nov '16 6:27:08 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised