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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Trump's trade war is stupid stupid stupid and continuing under a new name and administration would be shooting yourself in the foot,there are other ways to nettle china about their human rights records,a trade war is not one of them,it's hurts the US more then it's hurts china
Edited by Ultimatum on Jan 13th 2019 at 11:50:38 AM
have a listen and have a link to my discord serverGiven the President (for Life)'s position depends on constant economic growth and the fact he's a monster who shoves people in concentration camps, the complete lack of action regarding economics regarding him or any form of sanctions is Shrug of Apathy that should not be maintained.
Trump's attacks are literally the only thing that has hurt his position and that was purely by accident on his part.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 13th 2019 at 4:00:13 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.The left was by and large united behind Hillary, something like 90% of Bernie supporters voted for Hillary, I think it was actully a higher percentage than that of Hillary supporters that went for Obama.
Don’t get fooled by the lie about the democrats being divided being what caused 2016, it was much more Russian meddling, voter suppression, Comey abusing his office and press false equivalencies.
Edited by Silasw on Jan 13th 2019 at 12:58:55 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranI mean, when an election is as close as 2016 was, you can't very well say that any given factor didn't matter.
But, equally, I'm not too worried about history repeating itself here? Like, whenever anybody says anything bad about any of Democrats who are running, it's almost always got a 'but obviously Trump is much worse' disclaimer attached. People weren't talking like that in 2015.
Its more the fact that I think there does need to be a sense of just how dire the situation is.
Yes, anything different would be great because while the election WAS close, the problem is it shouldn't have been close at all.
We do need somehow to reach people who did vote for Trump.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.The risk is that some of the factors are repeatable, Russian interference could happen again, voter suppression will happen again, media false equivalencies may well happen again. We shouldn’t see interference by the FBI Director again and there’s no way to repeate the decade long campaign against Hillary (though they’re trying against Warren), but that’s still mroe repeatable factors than anyone should be comfortable with.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranComey broke federal law with his desicion to publicly reopen the investigation into Hillary days before the election.
According to federal law he should have never commented publicly on the investigation, once he did that he put himself in a corner where once Weiner’s computer turned up he’d have to either violate the law again and throw the election to Trump, or damage his own reputation and put his job at risk by not making another public statement. He chose to save his own skin because he’s a terrible person.
Notice how Comey never publicly commented on the FBI investigating Trump but twice publicly spoke about the FBI investigating Hillary.
Comey was the third most important individual actor in the election, which is absurd for someone holding a nominally neutral public office.
Now we know that Comey broke federal law to protect his own skin, but at the time it wasn’t an absurd idea to speculate that he either did it out of Republican loyalty to the party or because he’d been compromised by the Russians.
Edited by Silasw on Jan 13th 2019 at 1:09:52 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranI admit that’s a slightly longer than usual definition of days but I stand by the rest, he violated federal law and used his positon as FBI Director to influence the outcome of the election by making an illegal and rules violating announcement.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranWasn't it since learned that Comey was trying to get ahead of the story, since it was set to come out whatever he did?
Scoop: Trump dressed down Mulvaney in front of congressional leaders
Behind the scenes: The encounter came near the end of a meeting in the White House Situation Room on Jan. 4, these sources said. Trump had spent the meeting restating his demand for $5.7 billion for his wall. (Vice President Pence, at Trump's behest, had previously asked the Democrats for just $2.5 billion.)
Mulvaney inserted himself into the conversation and tried to negotiate a compromise sum of money, according to the sources in the room. Mulvaney said "that if Dems weren't OK with $5.7 [billion] and the president wasn't OK with $1.3 [the Democratic offer] ... he was trying to say we should find a middle ground," one of the sources said, paraphrasing Mulvaney's remarks.
"Trump cut him off ... 'You just fucked it all up, Mick,'" the source recalled Trump saying. "It was kind of weird."
Another source who was in the room confirmed the account. That source said their impression was that Trump was irritated at Mulvaney's negotiating style. "As a negotiator, Trump was resetting," the source said. "Mick was not reading the room or the president."
A White House official, who was in the room, responded to Axios' questions about the encounter: "This is an exaggerated account of the exchange that doesn't reflect the good relationship Mulvaney has built over the last two years with the president." (The official did not deny the quote we provided, but denied that it was as heated a moment as some in the room perceived it to be.)
The same WH official said, "The president and Mulvaney joked about it afterwards."
Ocasio-Cortez is driving more Twitter conversation than the top 5 news companies combined
https://www.axios.com/ocasio-cortez-dominates-twitter-6a997938-b8a5-4a8b-a895-0a1bcd073fea.html
Edited by sgamer82 on Jan 13th 2019 at 6:15:13 AM
I found a speech Warren gave on her foreign policy platform a few months ago, since someone said that was something they were concerned about. Highlighting the important bits:
On the geo-political situation that caused today's issues:
Policymakers were willing to sacrifice American jobs-not their own, of course-in return for boosting sales at Walmart and gaining access to consumer markets around the world.
Washington had it all figured out. And this confidence spilled over into more than trade deals. Champions of cutthroat capitalism pushed former Soviet states to privatize as quickly as possible, despite the risk of corruption. They looked the other way as China manipulated its currency to advance its own interests and undercut work done here in America.
...
Russia has become belligerent and resurgent. China has weaponized its economy without loosening its domestic political constraints. And over time, in country after country, faith in both capitalism and democracy has eroded.
...
Of course, those trade deals worked just great for giant corporations. Huge multinationals used their enormous influence on both sides of the negotiating table to ensure that the terms of the deals always favored their own bottom lines. At home, trillion-dollar global behemoths dominated entire market sectors, while limp U.S. antitrust enforcement remained stuck somewhere in the 1980s.
I believe capitalism has the capacity to deliver extraordinary benefits to American workers. But time after time, our economic policies left these workers with the short end of the stick: stagnant incomes, decimated unions, lower labor standards, rising costs of living. Job training and transition assistance have proven powerless against the onslaught of offshoring.
On Trump's New NAFTA:
For example, NAFTA 2.0 has better labor standards on paper but it doesn't give American workers enough tools to enforce those standards. Without swift and certain enforcement of these new labor standards, big corporations will continue outsourcing jobs to Mexico to so they can pay workers less.
NAFTA 2.0 is also stuffed with handouts that will let big drug companies lock in the high prices they charge for many drugs. The new rules will make it harder to bring down drug prices for seniors and anyone else who needs access to life-saving medicine.
And NAFTA 2.0 does little to reduce pollution or combat the dangers of climate change – giving American companies one more reason to close their factories here and move to Mexico where the environmental standards are lower. That’s bad for the earth and bad for American workers.
For these reasons, I oppose NAFTA 2.0, and will vote against it in the Senate unless President Trump reopens the agreement and produces a better deal for America’s working families.
Her Four Point Plan for American workers in the globalized world:
- We can make every trade promise equally enforceable, both those terms that help corporations and those that help workers.
- We can curtail the power of multinational monopolies through serious antitrust enforcement.
- We can work with our international partners to crack down on tax havens.
On broader international interaction:
- To get serious about privacy, we need to actually protect data rights – both from global technology companies hell bent on boosting market share and from governments that seek to exploit technology as a means to control their own people.
- To make progress on climate change and protect our higher standards here in the US, we should leverage foreign countries’ desire for access to U.S. markets as an opportunity to insist on meaningful environmental protections. Just last week our own government said that climate change is already happening and will dramatically endanger the world we share. The threat is real and it is existential-and we need to take action, now.
None of this requires sacrificing the interests of American businesses - although it will require some of them to take a longer view. The world exists beyond the next quarterly report.
On the Middle East:
...
Take Afghanistan. We've “turned the corner” in Afghanistan so many times that we're now going in circles. Poppy production is up. The Taliban are on the rise. Afghan forces are taking unsustainable losses. The government is losing territory and credibility. On my trip to Afghanistan last year, I met American service members who were young children on 9/11. This isn’t working.
Yes, we can - and we must - continue to be vigilant about the threat of terrorism, whether from Afghanistan or anywhere else. But rather than fighting in an Afghan civil war, let's help them reach a realistic peace settlement that halts the violence and protects our security. Let's make sure that the three brave Americans killed in Afghanistan this week are the last Americans to lose their lives in this war. It’s time to bring our troops home from Afghanistan - starting now.
Next, let's cut our bloated defense budget... If more money for the Pentagon could solve our security challenges, we would have solved them by now.
How do we responsibly cut back? We can start by ending the stranglehold of defense contractors on our military policy. It’s clear that the Pentagon is captured by the so-called "Big Five" defense contractors-and taxpayers are picking up the bill.
If you're skeptical that this a problem, consider this: the President of the United States has refused to halt arms sales to Saudi Arabia in part because he is more interested in appeasing U.S. defense contractors than holding the Saudis accountable for the murder of a Washington Post journalist or for the thousands of Yemeni civilians killed by those weapons.
She then goes on to talk
about domestic investment, the opioid epidemic, and right-wing terrorism.
Edited by Parable on Jan 13th 2019 at 5:17:37 AM
A break with Saudi Arabia would be nice, her acknowledgement of the rising issue of Russia is good but beyond that and the Afghanistan talk there seems to be no solid security substance, just economic talk.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranDepends who you're negotiating with, the Taliban is made up of a number of factions and draws much of its support from rural areas that they control militarily and which have been neglected by a very corrupt central government.
The problem is that the US isn't the only one negotiating, the Afgan government is negotiating as well and it has different goals than the US government.
That's before one gets into the fact that to negotiate with the Taliban one must really negotiate with Pakistan, who is a supposed ally and doesn't admit that it's internally split with half the country supporting the Taliban. Of and Pakistan is a nuclear power and thus invasion proof.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran@Charles
It's not a good look to try and quibble over whether forced labour is different from slavery. There's a reason it's considered one form of modern day slavery.
The International Labour Organization has some pages about forced labour and slavery.
Questions and answers on forced labour
Sex trafficking (which most would agree is modern day slavery) is considered forced labour. I'd also point out that this is technically not slavery in the sense that people own other people because people cannot legally own other people anymore.
Disgusted, but not surprisedI'm not saying I support forced labor but I think you undermine the definition of labor and abuses by saying that a person who is forced to do public works is the same as people who have suffered actual death, rape, and worse.
For example, if Bernie Madoff was forced to paint fences for the rest of his life to pay back his victims then I find it difficult to compare to a Gulag.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 13th 2019 at 5:42:17 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.The constitution states that what happens in US prisons is slavery, it explicitly says that the enslaved of prisoners is allowed.
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Based on the amendment I think that the US prison system does legally own the people it imprisons, or at least it's allowed to own them.
Edited by Silasw on Jan 13th 2019 at 1:43:55 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Yes. Exactly.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Bernie Madoff being forced to paint houses would still technically be slavery. The only difference is that he's someone who most people would think deserves it.
When you think about it, being a prisoner makes you a slave of the government. The government owns your ass until you've paid your debt to society one way or another.
Edited by M84 on Jan 13th 2019 at 9:48:13 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised

If I could just randomly select dream projects:
1. A shift to nuclear power
2. Approval of disposal of proper nuclear waste
3. A project to rebuild Detroit and Gary, Indiana.
4. Update of vital public infrastructure
5. Free healthcare since we're dreaming or working toward that wonderful attitude
6. End to private prisons or extreme restrictions on them.
7. Massive new regulation on pharmaceutical companies ability to raise prices above X percent of production cost.
8. Programs for First Americans to benefit from economically
9. Tackle the Hunger issue in America that certain politicians want to work
10. Forgive all college debt held by the government and remove all interest based loans in future ones.
11. Forgive drug crimes and commute massive numbers of offenders
12. Repeal Mandatory sentencing
13. Legalize marijuana nationally
14. Continue Trump's Trade War with China but call it Embargos for their Humanitarian violations
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jan 13th 2019 at 3:35:08 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.