[SolarCross]

The quicker the UK people realized that, discard them and start a new workers party, the better. Pretty much the same as in USA with the democrats.

Class War is so last century, the coming battle will be a Generation War, economically oppressed non-boomers vs the dying boomer hegemony.

[Negotiator]

Class War is so last century, the coming battle will be a Generation War, economically oppressed non-boomers vs the dying boomer hegemony.

[late]

Class War is so last century...

For you, reality is so last century.

Clinton was the first Boomer president. By that time, the rich already had most of the power. That is also the case in Britain.

Your karma ran over your dogma.

We got screwed, just not as bad. But it if makes you feel better, Trump is in court right now trying to kill Obamacare. Republicans, when they're not trying to kill Social Security, are nickel and dimeing it as much as they can.

Of course, those moves toward dystopia will hit the younger generations. So celebrate while you can.

[Sivad]

Class War is so last century, the coming battle will be a Generation War

The real war has always been tyranny vs liberty, and that war is being waged on every front there is including class and generation.

[SolarCross]

For you, reality is so last century.

Clinton was the first Boomer president. By that time, the rich already had most of the power. That is also the case in Britain.

We got screwed, just not as bad. But it if makes you feel better, Trump is in court right now trying to kill Obamacare. Republicans, when they're not trying to kill Social Security, are nickel and dimeing it as much as they can.

Of course, those moves toward dystopia will hit the younger generations. So celebrate while you can.

The boomers do not need a president to make their weight of numbers felt, just their votes are enough. The numbers are all in that video, the boomers are net takers from the tax / spend complex. It is getting more and more obvious how out of balance things are. We are at a point where boomer pensioners have a higher average income than people in full time employment. You can talk about the "rich" but the rich are the boomers.

[Rich]

Wtf Corbyn is no traitor.

Due to the silly voting system (majority vote, "winner takes all") in UK his last election looked bad on paper - but if UK would have a regular voting (aka proportional representation) system, then he would have looked very good, though he still wouldnt have won.

The Labour left support first past the post, because they know they're extremely unlikely to get a majority under PR. Ideally the left will do away with elections altogether, or at least free elections. But First Past the Post is their best chance to create the permanent dictatorship that they seek. The other reason the left support first past the post is that they are terrified of a genuinely anti immigration party emerging.

[late]

The boomers do not need a president to make their weight of numbers felt, just their votes are enough. The numbers are all in that video, the boomers are net takers from the tax / spend complex. It is getting more and more obvious how out of balance things are. We are at a point where boomer pensioners have a higher average income than people in full time employment. You can talk about the "rich" but the rich are the boomers.

It all goes back to income inequality.

Well, at least in reality it does.

In the American bailout, first thing they did was give the rich close to a trillion, money they didn't need.

So sure, a lot of the rich are Boomers. But they are less than 1% of the Boomers. So you are over 99% wrong.

FYI, modern economists don't think beggaring thy neighbor is a smart thing to do...

[SolarCross]

It all goes back to income inequality.

Well, at least in reality it does.

In the American bailout, first thing they did was give the rich close to a trillion, money they didn't need.

So sure, a lot of the rich are Boomers. But they are less than 1% of the Boomers. So you are over 99% wrong.

FYI, modern economists don't think beggaring thy neighbor is a smart thing to do...

Millions of boomers outweigh one or two hyper-rich guys who are also boomers most likely. The facts are, the boomers are taking more than their fair share and they are taking it from their children and their children's children. It is the boomers doing the beggaring actually.

[late]

Millions of boomers outweigh one or two hyper-rich guys who are also boomers most likely.

This video was made before the Corona virus decimated the economy. We are in a major economic crisis, and Republicans want to ignore it.

A lot of Boomers are going to wind up homeless, but the effect on millions of homeless kids will be devastating.

"For the past year, economists and policy experts had been warning of a coming economic downturn. But the screeching halt the economy has experienced in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t that, says Mike Konczal, who studies financial reform and unemployment at the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank. “It is so difficult to describe how this is not the next recession that would have eventually happened,” Konczal tells me.

There was this very influential way of viewing the housing crash. People would say, “Look, at the end of day, it’s not going to cause a severe recession because, while the value of homes has gone down, the price of future housing has also gone down. So even though your house lost half its value, the next house you’re going to buy also lost half its value. So are you really worse off?” But what actually happened was: It really did matter that people were underwater in debt and were being swamped by bad debts. Foreclosures would drive down whole neighborhoods, and there was a cascading effect where one foreclosure would lead to other houses in the neighborhood being worth less money, which would then further decrease economic activity. I think the same thing could be true if we screw this up.

(Me: That's cascade failure, it could lead to a Great Depression)

Second, I worry that a lot of small and medium businesses are going to essentially be wiped out and not recover and not come back in any form, which means we’ll have a much different economy afterwards. I think that is preventable. But it would require us to have institutions in place that we don’t have, and it would require political will and imagination."

You help your neighbors, you don't kill them. Or at least you shouldn't, and in any case, that would just make a bad situation worse...

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/03/can-the-federal-government-stop-the-small-business-apocalypse/

[SolarCross]

No one is talking about killing them, but there needs to be a redistribution since they took too much. If that does not happen then that is how civil wars start. Good luck winning that Grandpa.

[skinster]

And his problem isnt low intelligence, his problem is he is too soft and wants to please everyone. Even his friggin inner-party opponents.

Right. But the problem also was that the rightwing in the party, according to the leaked Labour report, spent all their time campaigning to lose because they hated Corbyn and the left of Labour so much. They could've won in 2017 if they campaigned to win.

Rightwing Labour are trying to whitewash the info from the leaked report.

[Negotiator]

Right. But the problem also was that the rightwing in the party, according to the leaked Labour report, spent all their time campaigning to lose because they hated Corbyn and the left of Labour so much. They could've won in 2017 if they campaigned to win.

Rightwing Labour are trying to whitewash the info from the leaked report.

I dont disagree there, but to me the core problem here is that these people have been in the position to even do such scheming in the first place. Why wouldnt Corbyn notice they worked against him, and replace them ?

[Steve_American]

late wrote:
It all goes back to income inequality.
Well, at least in reality it does.
In the American bailout, first thing they did was give the rich close to a trillion, money they didn't need.
So sure, a lot of the rich are Boomers. But they are less than 1% of the Boomers. So you are over 99% wrong.
FYI, modern economists don't think beggaring thy neighbor is a smart thing to do...

Millions of boomers outweigh one or two hyper-rich guys who are also boomers most likely. The facts are, the boomers are taking more than their fair share and they are taking it from their children and their children's children. It is the boomers doing the beggaring actually.

I believe you said that retirees have a larger average income than full time workers. I don't know if it is true but let's accept it and see what we can say to make it worthless.
1] If by 'retired' you are including everyone over 65 years old then you are including almost all the super rich and excluding the rest of them who live off their investments as non full-time workers. When you do an average of
5+5+5+10+100 you get 125/5 =25. Or, 5+5+5+10+1000 you get 1025/5 =205. This is just an example to illustrate the meaninglessness of averaging the super rich into many others.
2] Do you remember the analogy that goes like this? A rich guy, a poor guy, and a doctor are sitting at a table with a cake. The rich guy cuts the cake into 90% and 10% pieces, takes to 90% piece and says to the others, "You can have the rest."
. . . So, in our case the doctor might be the retired and the workers the poor guy.
. . . The Boomers now, in over half the cases, live off Soc. Sec. and they have made double payments since 1983 to fill up the Soc. Sec. Trust Fund. We are not going to look kindly at a politician who cuts our benefits because we paid for our fathers and made payments for ourselves for up to 37 years. The other income Boomers are getting are from pensions and investments that they made with after tax money they earned.
. . . OTOH, workers are being screwed by the rich not by all Boomers. Working Boomers did not like NAFTA, they did not like it that real wages have been flat for 37 years and the CPI does not accurately track the effect of inflation on the standard of living of workers. [This is what he meant about workers earning less now that they did in the 80s.] Working Boomers didn't want any of the many changes that caused the decline of workers real wages over the last 39 years.
. . . So, yes, there are a few Boomers who did want those things but they were not the majority of Boomers. However, apparently they were the ones who mattered.

Thomas Frank got it right. He says that starting about in 1990 the Democratic Party decided to screw the workers and work for the top 15% of earners. They thought that the workers had nowhere else to go. That 3rd parties are not allowed in a 1st past the post voting system and the workers would not vote for the Repubs because they were obviously worse for the workers than the Dems intended to be.
. . . And, that did NOT work out well for the Dems at all after 2009. By then the workers were catching on to the swindle. They began to vote based on other issues when it became clear that the Dems would not work for them (workers) economically, so why vote for them. So, they voted against gun control, or against abortion, or against affirmative action,or against gender issues, etc. That is, those workers voted for the Repuds. so, after 2009 the Dems were crushed in 2010 and after that at the local, state, and national levels. Over and over again. And Pres. Obama was, like Pres. Clinton, one of the Boomer Dems who worked for the top 15% of earners and screwed the workers and college students. IIRC, Pres. Obama even put Soc. Sec. on the table in an effort to get the Repuds to come the the table and work together on a plan. The Repuds refused, but some retired people heard him no doubt and decided to vote for Trump because he promised changes and Obama and the Dems had signaled that they *are* willing to throw the retirees under the buss.

The current covid crisis illustrates this perfectly. Suddenly Dems and Repuds can agree that a $3.5-T (or more) deficit is a good thing as long as almost all of it goes to the top 15%. I'm hearing suggestions that these deficits will have to be 'paid for someday'. And they mean with social services cuts, Soc. Sec. cuts, and tax increases that will fall on everyone but the rich.

This is why you are being screwed and it isn't mostly the Boomers. It is the rich, only the rich who are screwing you. The retired Boomers earned their retirement incomes, but like me, could not stop the rich from screwing the workers (that is 80% of the American people).

IIRC, the same thing happened in the UK when the LP sold out the workers in favor of the top 15% of earners.

Like someone said the 1st past the post system has to go.
I have suggested that you not have a full proportional system and instead compromise and have a system where all the districts have 5 or 7 MPs. There are 4 "state" like areas in the UK, right? They are England, Scotland, Wales, and N. Ireland. The districts would not extend over these borders. I don't know how your population in UK is distributed. I would guess the N. Ireland and Wales would have 1 district and Scotland 2 or 3 and England the rest of the districts.
. . . The system works with each voter being allowed to vote for more than 1 candidate and the new vote counting machines (1 designed by the LP, 1 by the Tories, etc.) the machines would give the resulting fractional votes and add them together for each candidate in the race in the district. The proper number of candidates who got the most total of fractional votes would be the MPs from that district.
. . . The large num. of MPs per district is to let 3rd and 4th parties use a bullet vote by all their members to win with as little as 8% of the vote in that district. This large # also keeps the major parties from settling for a 2 to 1 out of 3 split. This 2-1 out of 3 split will almost always happen if the dist has just 3 MP.
. . . This system also makes gerrymandering far less useful even with total partisan control to the district boundaries.

[Steve_American]

I'm just a retired American I should not tell the British people or political parties to do. But, I will any way.
The Labour Party is screwed until it does 2 things.
1] It has to reject the mistakes of the last 30 year or so, and go back to being the party of the workers because that is where the most votes are.

2] It has to embrace Modern Monetary Theory. It has to do this now because it has to educate the voters that the mainstream economic theories are left overs from the gold standard era. Worrying about the deficit is really worrying about the total national debt.
. . However, like every debt it is 2 different things depending on which side you focus on. Banks do the same things bond buyers do. Bankers think they are doing great the more loans they make. That is they want to hold the assets that those pieces of paper represent. They would not want anyone to take them away from them. MMTer PhD Prof. say the Gov. bond holders feel the same way agout their bonds, that they are important assets. MMTers say that it is just stupid for a nation to go through a process that destroys those bonds and so destroys money and assets of the people.
. . MMTers say that the size of the national debt is pretty much meaningless, and what little it means is the bigger the better. The more assets the people have the happier they will be. There is no downside to a huge national debt.
. . MMters say that the deficit might be a problem if it is being used to try to buy labour or resources that the economy is already fully using, because this will likely cause too much inflation.
. . What this means is that deficits are good until they get *extremely* big or should I say huge. Right now there is almost no limit on deficit spending. But, some taxes are still necessary.

Like every post I have to remind the nutjobs that this only applies to nations with a full fiat currency. All nations in the eurozone and most nations in the EU do *not* have a full fiat currency. Developing nations rarely have a full fiat currency. But, they can work toward one.

. . So combining #1 & #2 we get the Labour Party should use deficit spending to help the working class survive the covid-crisis and then reduce income inequality.
.

[Steve_American]

In so far as several Mainstream economists are now saying, "MMT has *nothing* new, we knew all this already," I have an idea.

The Labour Party need to have a 'retreate' and come out with a line along these lines, "We have just recently learned that most Mainstream economists have been lying to us for decades or at least holding back key information. Now they are telling us that MMT has been right for 26 years and that truly deficits don't matter. At least until the nation is using all its labour and real resources to the fullest extent possible. Also that, the size of the national debt doesn't matter at all, ever." And so on.
.

[Negotiator]

The size of national debt of course does matter, as for example Greece can assure you - but only depening upon the situation.

USA debt doesnt matter, no matter what. The USA can literally just print money. Everyone has to accept it as currency, because you need US dollars to buy Saudi oil. Thats why the size of the national debt of the USA is always effectively zero. Everyone who is actually allowed to give credit to the USA can view it as a priviledge, because their central bank could really just buy it all. Instead they nicely print some more of their US dollar to pay you interest. After all, they can just print money.

But thats the exclusive priviledge when your national currency is the global currency.

Japans national debt has raised to 240% GDP now but it doesnt really matter, because they have to pay very little interest. Still, even a small interest can get very high if debt raises indefinitely. So Japans national debt cannot raise indefinitely. Still, they are more in debt than many other countries that got in deep trouble, but they have no problem to find people who willingly lend them money for low interest.

The EU, well, thats a hairy situation. Basically in the EU, Germany, Austria and Luxembourg are guaranteed to win, while the other countries are bound to lose. Thats because Germany and Austria pay too low wages, relative to their productivity, and thus benefit from the value of the Euro, which relative to their economic power is too weak. The other countries on the other hand, beginning with France, suffer from the fact that the Euro is effectively too strong for them. That means their imports are cheap, but their exports are too expensive, basically resulting in an incentive to accumulate debt.

The EU system, which has a unified currency but not unified economic leadership, is basically a return of mediveal times mercantilism, when the only way to improve the situation of your country was to make the situation of another country worse. Back in late mediveal and early modern times, you needed gold to create money, so countries which had access to a lot of gold from the new world, such as spain and portugal, had an advantage.

[Steve_American]

@Negotiator,
The nations in the EU and especially nations in the eurozone do not have their own full fiat currency. This is the huge difference. People need to stop pointing to Greece as if that nation is like the US. It is *not* like the US at all.
I am not talking about them. They are different.
You didn't mention the other nations (other than US & Japan) that do have their own full fiat currency. Nations like Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, etc.
Also, you don't understand that US, Japan and the other nations with their own fiat currency can reduce their national debt very simply. They can stop issuing bonds and just create the dollars, yen, or whatever to pay off existing bonds as they come due. Or they can direct their central Bank=CB to just cancel those bonds that the nation owes to their own CB.
You think that the US is more special than it is. But, you, at least, do understand the situation of the US. But for the wrong reason.
People who want to know about other nations (like Brazil, India, and Thailand) should listen to Dr. Kelton's podcast I just posted in Political Circus.
I should NOT have to say every time that I'm only talking about nations that have their own full fiat currency and meet the 3 criteria I have listed 4 times. This would include the nations of the EU if they left the EU. See my thread here in Europe about nations leaving the EZ (like the UK has done), there they do discuss this exact point.
.

[skinster]

I dont disagree there, but to me the core problem here is that these people have been in the position to even do such scheming in the first place. Why wouldnt Corbyn notice they worked against him, and replace them ?

He didn't have access to the personal emails and phones of the Labour MPs that were working against him during the election of 2017 which revealed details of their treachery, and mostly because he was working hard on trying to win for the party, like what those traitors were meant to be doing.

[snapdragon]

What difference did it really make?

The voters didn't like Corbyn. He messed up.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... port-finds

Labour “went into the 2019 election without a clear strategy of which voters we needed to persuade or how”, and failed to settle on a coherent message with the power of 2017’s “For the many, not the few”.

• “It was unclear who was in charge” of the election campaign, and relationships were soured by years of infighting which had created a “toxic culture” and “significant strategic and operational dysfunction”.

• Labour was outgunned by the Tories in the digital war, with messages poorly coordinated and most of them failing to reach beyond the party’s base.

• Helped by their clear “Get Brexit done” message, the Conservatives succeeded in turning out 2 million previous non-voters, accounting for two thirds of the increase in their vote share.

• Labour’s seat targeting was “unrealistic” and “not evidence-based”, and many candidates felt they did not receive enough support from the national party.

On the button




They find that Corbyn’s leadership was a “significant factor” in the 2019 result. His public approval ratings collapsed at around the time a group of Labour MPs including Luciana Berger and Chuka Umunna left to found the Independent Group, citing antisemitism within Labour and its Brexit policy.


True. Labour's Brexit policy was embarrassing.


When it came to Labour’s radical manifesto, launched at an upbeat rally in Birmingham, the analysis found that individual policies were popular, but doubts about the leadership stoked a perception that the package as a whole was not deliverable.

completely true.

A Datapraxis analysis of YouGov data found that “many came to the conclusion that the manifesto as a whole was unrealistic, risky and unlikely to be delivered. This undermined the positive response to individual policies, making them seem less credible.”

yep.

I don't agree that most Labour voters were or are brexiteers. Not in any shape or form.

Most Labour voters are remainers.
Ian Lavery and John Trickett were wrong and are still wrong.

[skinster]

I see you're still ignoring the leaked Labour report showing what bigots and bullies there are in the right of the party who campaigned to lose the election in 2017, when Labour would've won by just an extra 2200 votes.

The voters didn't like Corbyn. He messed up.

Labour's Brexit policy was embarrassing.

Indeed. If only the right of the party accepted the Brexit vote and didn't try to ram a second referendum down everyone's throat. Labour lost the last election in large part because of this, which the right of the party are directly responsible for. People like Keir Starmer and you, snapdragon.

Anyway, good luck with Starmer, he's doing a fantastic job of imitating Tony Blair, who everyone hates. He's not doing well in the polls too, despite the Tory government's awful handling of the covid pandemic. So we have two rightwing parties in the UK again like they do in the US. Congrats!