Donald's Plan B - Page 6 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

Wandering the information superhighway, he came upon the last refuge of civilization, PoFo, the only forum on the internet ...

Political issues and parties in the USA and Canada.

Moderator: PoFo North America Mods

Forum rules: No one line posts please.
By skinster
#15123328
Americans Who Support Status Quo Politics Are American Supremacists
Trump is a bad president. He’s coddled oligarchs both in America and around the world, he made a mess of the pandemic response and lied about it, he’s incited violence and inflamed hate, he’s done nothing for ordinary Americans, he’s facilitated ecocide, any good decisions he’s made on foreign policy have been far outweighed by the bad, and his recent refusal to guarantee a peaceful transition of power if defeated in November is concerning.

That said, Trump is not a uniquely bad president. The only way to see him that way is to believe that American lives are far, far more important than those of the millions of mostly brown-skinned human beings who have been murdered by the US war machine under the leadership of both Trump and his predecessors.

Just since 9/11 several million people have been killed and tens of millions displaced by American military violence to shore up control of key geostrategic regions with the goal of total global domination. Trump has not been any worse in the facilitation of this butchery than his predecessors. Where he differs significantly is in the amount of stress that his presidency has been causing Americans.

I don’t mean to make light of the stress, disruption and anxiety that Americans have experienced during the Trump administration, but to suggest that it comes anywhere remotely close to the unbroken streak of blood staining presidencies long preceding this one is absurd. Millions of people brutally murdered for imperialist resource control agendas and war plutocrat profit margins is vastly more significant than the emotional discomfort of Americans. It just is. If you disagree with what I just said, you are wrong.



I am not saying who Americans should or should not vote for. What I am saying is that the belief that this election is uniquely important because this president is uniquely bad is the product of a worldview which sees American lives as much more important than non-American lives. It is the worldview of American supremacism.

American supremacism is like any other supremacist ideology which holds an empowered group as innately superior to disempowered groups, except since its consequences are exported overseas its adherents don’t have to look at those consequences. For this reason, most American supremacists are not aware that that’s what they are. Their politics don’t hold all people as equal, but they are able to compartmentalize away from that fact since its consequences are out of sight and out of mind.

If they were executing immigrants in American streets by the millions, there’d be a very conscious divide between those who support this and those who do not, because everyone would be constantly confronted with the fact that it’s happening and forced to come down on one side or the other on the issue. But since it’s an atrocity Americans don’t have to look at, and since their oligarchic news media are all too happy to passively conceal it from them, they wind up unconsciously selecting American supremacism as their default position by supporting the status quo which promotes it.

Americans who support status quo politics, whether by the oligarchic warmongering Democratic Party or the oligarchic warmongering Republican Party, are American supremacists. They might not know it, but they are. They support a political paradigm in which people in other parts of the world are violently butchered to protect a US-centralized power structure which exists solely for the benefit of the powerful. Their American supremacist worldview allows them to see their own emotional discomfort as more significant than human bodies getting ripped apart by explosives every day around the world in support of the status quo their mainstream political faction promotes.



And it’s just taken as a given that it has to be this way. It’s taken as a given by both of America’s mainstream political factions that endless military expansionism, bombings, starvation sanctions and cold war escalations are going to continue, and the only things up for debate are the specific details of exactly how it’s going to continue and whether or not saying “black lives matter” makes you a communist.

And of course it doesn’t have to be this way. America could just function as a normal country, minding its own affairs inside its own borders without murdering anyone for happening to live near fossil fuels. There’s no legitimate reason why it could not. The endless slaughter benefits no ordinary people in any way.

It would be one thing if Americans actually benefited from all the bloodshed; that would just be garden variety human predation. But it’s not even that; the American supremacist worldview serves nobody but a few elite sociopaths who’ve enmeshed themselves with the world’s most powerful government. Ordinary Americans consent to the interminable churning of the US war machine at their own expense and to their own detriment because they are kept ignorant, poor and propagandized so they don’t get any grand ideas about intervening in the empire-building of the manipulators.

Regardless of what happens in November, this is madness and it must not continue. Don’t let the sideshow of electoral politics distract from this vastly more important fact. Vote for whoever you want, but have no illusions about that vote addressing what is by far the most crucial issue with the US government.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/09/25 ... remacists/
User avatar
By Rancid
#15123329
annatar1914 wrote:''The love of money is the root of all evil''


You don't worship the dollar?
By annatar1914
#15123341
Rancid wrote:You don't worship the dollar?


Lol....No, even ''Francisco D'Aconia'' in ''Atlas Shrugged'' and his speech about money being absolute good could not sway me.

When I first read Ayn Rand-and I absolutely read everything by her I could get my hands on when I was younger-I knew that I had met my absolute Antithesis in thought.
User avatar
By Rancid
#15123342
annatar1914 wrote:
Lol....No, even ''Francisco D'Aconia'' in ''Atlas Shrugged'' and his speech about money being absolute good could not sway me.

When I first read Ayn Rand-and I absolutely read everything by her I could get my hands on when I was younger-I knew that I had met my absolute Antithesis in thought.


A crying shame. The accumulation of money is the ultimate virtue. It's a shame money has yet to usurp religion.

I set how much I respect someone by their net worth.
User avatar
By blackjack21
#15123380
jimjam wrote:I just have time for one, as you know, my favorite: Ever since he was a presidential candidate, President Donald Trump has been promising the American people a “TERRIFIC,” “PHENOMINAL” and “FANTASTIC” new health care plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. ( :lol: )

But, in the 3½ years since he set up shop in the Oval Office, he has yet to deliver.

And that makes him unique in what way? We can go back to the 1980s and hear politicians making the same promises. Do I think he's full of shit on that? Of course. I've thought he might be able to repeal ObamaCare, and hoped for as much. I've never believed for a second that he could deliver a policy of lower prices with the ability to buy with pre-existing conditions. Why? What the American people want is not possible. Either the people MUST accept rationing, constrained choices, mandatory purchasing by state governments, selling insurance across state lines, substantially higher costs, etc., or they can continue to be disappointed by politicians.

If you feel betrayed, that is your personal issue; and, in part, because you choose not to really delve into this stuff with a serious or inquisitive mind, and rather just vent your spleen here. Running to keep the weight off and then drinking beers and smoking cigars on your veranda lamenting the shape of fat people won't make you any healthier either. Maybe it'll make you feel good about yourself. However, to understand why politicians cannot deliver, you must understand economics.

I don't know if you have the bandwidth or inclination (from years of debating with you, I'm inclined to think you don't), but I like listening to Viva & Barnes on Sunday afternoons (attorneys lean liberal), your evening around 7. It's interesting to hear lawyers banter about these questions.



Trump is not conning me, because I know you cannot mandate selling insurance with no pre-existing conditions economically. When people cannot make an economic argument, they often abandon economic arguments and make a moral arguments. Freiheit and Barnes talk a bit about the mandate and why Trump is for it in the foregoing video. Barnes indicates that Trump is in support of it because of polling. However, the average person does not have a background in economics, and easily falls for the argument that no pre-existing conditions is a rational basis for selling insurance.

It does make the Barrett nomination interesting, in part according to Barnes too, because she has ruled that mandating the sale of insurance with no pre-existing conditions is beyond the power of Congress to legislate. That's a somewhat complicated question. In upholding ObamaCare, Roberts characterized the mandate as nothing more than a tax. Barrett will likely be attacked on her ruling, but a proper response can be that Congress can simply punitively tax insurers who discriminate on pre-existing conditions. By contrast, Ruth Bader Ginsberg did something utterly confounding: she voted with Roberts, and then dissented on her own vote. This is the problem of letting advocates on to the court. They simply lack the internal self-consistency required by economics, and much of law.

It may seem paradoxical, but the courts have upheld the mandate to purchase car insurance. However, it's the police power of the state, not the federal government. Imagine if they hadn't, but they allowed you to purchase car insurance with no pre-existing conditions? You could get in a car accident on Monday, purchase insurance on Tuesday and file a claim, leaving the insurance company and all the previous premium payers liable for your car repair bill. Once the car is repaired, you could simply cancel the insurance. It's simply not economically possible to run things that way. It would not make insurance affordable. It would simply destroy the insurance market. That's Congress' goal, by the way (in case you didn't know). They just need to fool stupid people, and luckily for them there are many many stupid people.

Trust me. I live in California. In the infinite wisdom of the legislature, over a decade ago they required utilities to purchase gas and electricity on the spot market, banning them from securing long-term contracts, but regulated the amount they could charge consumers. Traders simply gamed the system, driving prices through the roof and bankrupted our largest Northern California utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Company. A school friend of mine's father was the CEO at the time. If marginal price is less than marginal cost, you reach the shutdown point. You may understand it. You may not understand it. It may hurt your feelings. It may make you think someone is immoral, greedy, racist, or some other unflattering characterization. No legislature can change market forces forever. When they make something like that a matter of law, traders will game the system and drive up energy prices while shorting utilities. Remember Enron?

jimjam wrote:Fuck the privacy act.

It's the law. If you want to repeal the Privacy Act, let your Congressman know. The law has to apply equally to everyone in America, so be careful what you wish for.

jimjam wrote:For about the 10th time ……. If he has nothing to hide …. let us see the returns..... obviously he has LOTS to hide and we want to see it.

Again, for about the 10th time, that's not an argument with any legal standing. I understand you aren't a fan of the Bill of Rights, but the Fourth Amendment is pretty clear.

4th Amendment wrote:The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It's clearly restated with respect to the Privacy Act. In fact, the Privacy Act was passed because of political abuse. From the legislative history of the Privacy Act, they passed it precisely to defeat someone like Nixon--to prevent precisely what the Democrats are trying to do to Trump.

Legislative History of the Privacy Act of 1974 wrote:If we have learned anything in this last year of Watergate, it is
that there must be limits upon what the Government can know about
each of its citizens. Each time we give up a bit of information about
ourselves to the Government, we give up some of our freedom. For
the more the Government or any institution knows about us, the more
power it has over us. When the Government knows all of our secrets,
we stand naked before official power. Stripped of our privacy, we lose
our rights and privileges. The Bill of Rights then becomes just so
many words.

This is why Surveillance Capitalism is becoming such an issue, and why giving all your personal information to Facebook, Twitter, and others is such a dangerous thing.

annatar1914 wrote:You don't have to like President Trump; but his opposition is a gaggle of venal, stupid, arrogant, and gerontocratic misfits who have well overstayed their time at the Washington trough;

Is that ever an understatement.

Beren wrote:Well, in my opinion Hillary Clinton was demonized and screwed by "the Russians", however, jimjam doesn't care about her.

Julian Assange may be a lot of things, but he's not exactly a friend of Russia either. He says that Russia was not the source of Clinton's emails, and he vaguely hinted after Seth Rich's death that it was Rich, and that Rich paid with his life for providing that information to WikiLeaks.

What we have in the US is an establishment Civil War, where the principals--the long-standing wealthy and powerful--are reasserting that the professional political class are not principals. They are agents. The behavior of the Clintons, and their general contempt for the law--more or less flaunting their non-prosecution agreements in the public's face--undermined the legitimacy of government. They are really the ones who took her out.
By Rich
#15123393
blackjack21 wrote:It may seem paradoxical, but the courts have upheld the mandate to purchase car insurance.

I presume the mandate is to ensure against injury and damage to others not to oneself is it seems fundamentally different to mandating health care insurance. I was extremely opposed to Obama's health mandates, as far as I was concerned they were pure fascism. The reason that I was so opposed was not that I cared so deeply about Americans, but because it was an extremely dangerous precedent that if allowed to stand in America could come to my country next.

I was right to see the dangers of Obama's corporate medical fascism, but even I didn't realise how quickly things would ramp up. When I heard that we were in a legal lockdown, within ten minutes I was out on my local high street. But the place was empty, so within a couple of days I decided I wasn't going to stand out. Thankfully we are finally seeing people start to resist here in Britain.
By skinster
#15123397
Let’s Be Real: President Biden Would Probably Be More Hawkish Than Trump
People who dislike Trump are often reluctant to talk about this, but it looks likely that a Biden administration would be more warlike than its predecessor.

In a recent interview with US Department of Defense newspaper Stars and Stripes, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said it’s important to keep troops in the Middle East to fight terrorism, and that it’s likely that America’s bloated military budget will not only remain at its current size but may actually increase under his presidency due to the need to focus on “near peer” threats like China and Russia.

This is not a deviation in messaging from Biden and his crack team of beltway string-pullers, but a continuation of already established patterns. His campaign has been consistently out-hawking Trump on foreign policy by attacking him for insufficient aggression toward Venezuela, China, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and of course Russia, as well as criticizing Trump for not acting like a “wartime president“.



In a July interview with Biden foreign policy advisor Anthony Blinken, The Wall Street Journal‘s Walter Russell Mead was told of the campaign’s plan to “tame China, Russia and woke Democrats” using “Cold War-era Democratic policy”, including “a liberal multilateralism—supplemented when absolutely necessary by the American military and a willingness to use it.”

“A Biden administration won’t be looking for a reset, a grand bargain, or anything more than a businesslike relationship with Vladimir Putin,” Mead wrote after the interview. “Democrats haven’t been this hawkish on Russia since the Kennedy administration.”

“While China’s rise and Russia’s turn to the dark side complicate foreign policy, the ideas and institutions of the liberal internationalist order are failing not because the world is fundamentally changing but because the global liberal system has been starved of a critical ingredient in the Trump years: American support,” Mead writes.

Again, these are the positions that Biden Incorporated is campaigning on. Because war is a horrific evil which people naturally abhor, US presidents reliably campaign as doves and govern as hawks; Trump did it, Obama did it, even Bush did it. Biden has paid occasional lip service to the need to end the “forever wars”, including in the aforementioned Stars and Stripes interview, but overall he’s been campaigning for his first term far closer to the militaristic end of the spectrum than any president in recent memory.



This to me spells trouble, and I’m not the only one.

In a Jacobin article titled “Expect More Military ‘Liberal Interventionism’ Under a Joe Biden Presidency“, Derek Davidson and Alex Thurston write that “The liberal establishment is desperate to return a centrist to the White House in November and reestablish the country’s more stable military dominance of the world order, disrupted only briefly by Donald Trump. Joe Biden’s terrible track record on foreign policy — including his championing of war in Iraq — suggests a return to Obama-style strong military interventions abroad.”

In a Japan Times article titled “On foreign policy, Biden is worse than Trump“, Ted Rall contrasts Trump’s relatively dovish campaign trail promises to “stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with” against Biden’s consistent attempts to out-hawk the sitting president, noting Biden’s horrible track record on Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia and all Obama’s wars.

But overall Biden’s extensively documented love of war isn’t something people generally want to think about if they despise the current president. Indeed Trump has been a horrible warmonger in his own right, and it’s hard to imagine how Biden couldn’t be at least a slight improvement in some tense areas like Iran and Yemen, to say nothing of his spectacular faceplants and authoritarian abuses at home.

Still it’s hard to look at all the sabre rattling Biden and his team of ventriloquists have been doing on the campaign trail without getting the distinct impression that some major international escalations are being planned.



I don’t point this out to tell Americans to vote for Trump in November; Trump is a ghoul and I’m not going to tell people not to do what they think they need to do in response to his presence. Indeed if wars are planned it seems entirely likely that they will happen regardless of what oligarchic puppet happens to be sitting in the Oval Office after January 20th, just like the escalations that were scheduled to begin against Russia under Hillary Clinton ended up getting rolled out anyway under Trump despite his vocal opposition to them. The war pigs are doubtless planning for any contingency, and it’s very possible they can get around any inertia Trump’s befuddled orneriness might throw in their way.

I mainly point this out to say that wars are planned, and we should plan accordingly. The fact that there’s a nominee spouting hawkish vitriol for one of America’s two oligarchic parties is more a symptom of these preexisting oligarchic agendas than an organically arising phenomenon, so those who love peace and oppose warmongering and world-threatening nuclear escalations should be ready to stand against something very ugly in the near future.

In an even remotely sane world, war would be something everyone avoids with all their might and uses only as a very last resort. In a world that is dominated by an empire driven by the agenda of unipolar hegemony, wars are sought and planned for as an end in themselves, and excuses are invented to get into them.

War is the single most crazy and self-destructive behavior our species engages in, and the presence of armageddon weapons makes it infinitely more so. Our survival depends on peace finding some way to get a word in edgewise before it is too late.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/09/14 ... han-trump/


Re: who is behind Biden and how some people believe it's Obama, turns out it's actually Clinton, but she's behind Kamala Harris. I heard about this being discussed somewhere on a show. Would normally share a source to prove this but since pretty much nobody does that here these days, I'll pretend my opinion is worth something too. :D
By annatar1914
#15123427
@blackjack21, on my characterization of the leadership of the Democratic party as 'venal, arrogant, stupid and gerontocratic', you said;

blackjack21 wrote:

Is that ever an understatement.




Yes, I went light on them this time :D

I'll add another trait of theirs; dangerous.

A Biden Presidency would have the Military-Industrial complex/National Security State absolutely engaging in all manner of mad foreign adventurism, with a military (and I say this as a man from a military family that has fought for generations in our wars) that has not won a single serious conflict since 1945.

The peace of the world requires a Biden loss in 2020.
User avatar
By Beren
#15123429
blackjack21 wrote:Julian Assange may be a lot of things, but he's not exactly a friend of Russia either. He says that Russia was not the source of Clinton's emails, and he vaguely hinted after Seth Rich's death that it was Rich, and that Rich paid with his life for providing that information to WikiLeaks.

I wouldn't think Snowden was a friend of Russia either, however, now he's in voluntary exile in Russia, so it's not a matter of that. Seth Rich also could have been a Russian agent, we just don't know, maybe he did not know either. However, Hillary must be still so angry with the Russians for a reason, and I doubt it's only because of the smear campaign against her in social media.

Anyway, Americans have to deal with the fact that their domestic politics is a playground for a lot of foreign actors of all kinds, including the Russians as well, and their influence is actually growing by the time jeopardising their republic, which would be in jeopardy even without that perhaps, so they should rather be cautious.
User avatar
By jimjam
#15123609
blackjack21 wrote:If you feel betrayed, that is your personal issue


I hardly feel "betrayed", I'm a big boy. I am essentially a muckraker and like to point out what I see as wrong. Hardly a "liberal" nor a "conservative". Such classifications are for the simple minded. ie. LBJ was a Democrat /"liberal" who caved to the military/industrial complex by involving America in a completely needless war in Vietnam where kids in their prime were plucked from their lives and sent to the other side of the world to kill or be killed to protect America from ……. Communism? Why the steel coffin contract alone i'm sure got some rich scum bag richer.

blackjack21 wrote:Running to keep the weight off and then drinking beers and smoking cigars on your veranda lamenting the shape of fat people won't make you any healthier either. Maybe it'll make you feel good about yourself.


Interesting that you follow my life ……. however inaccurately. Permit me some corrections. I hardly run to keep off weight. I have been dashing, running and jogging for 60 years because I LOVE it. It helps keep me physically AND mentally fit. Among other things it is a form of meditation. I came near death after a Boston Marathon and spent 3 days in a hospital and estimate that I have circled the globe 2& 1/2 X at the equator.
Beers and cigars? One beer and one small Parodi cigar per night while watching the stars and clearing my head. I do not "lament" the shape of the obese. I feel sorry for their lack of self control and addiction to shit food. I lament that 40% of Americans are obese. It is a national tragedy that is rarely discussed. Surely a much greater tragedy than nonsense like America being taken over by Communism which is what folks like your boy Donald uses to distract us from real problems. I "feel good about myself" after finishing a 2 mile run by the ocean and am exhausted and covered in sweat :) .

I am not familiar with Viva and Barnes but have copied don their names and will look for them on the internet. Thank you (I even listen to Rush Limberg :eek: )

America? I count my blessings. I am sooooo fortunate to live here. I went from being homeless to spending a retirement where money is not something I think about and I am able to live on the coasts of Maine and Florida. I am very patriotic which is why seeing a lunatic like Fat Donald doing so much harm to the country I love so bothers me.

There ….. that's as close as I can come to your quote bombs …… take care of yourself.
User avatar
By jimjam
#15123967
Image

Fat Donald made obvious in his last night's "debate" performance what we already knew: His dog whistle call out to the armed hate group Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by" made clear that his effort to sow chaos after he loses the election will include murder and death in the streets ……. not unlike street violence in 1930's Germany prior to Hitler's rise to power.

History does indeed repeat ……. :eek:

For those who apparently did not see this post pro[…]

A new film has been released destroying the offic[…]

Sounds like perfect organized crime material ex[…]

Commercial foreclosures increase 97% from last ye[…]