YoungDemCA

YoungDemCA's Journal

November 14, 2017

I think most people in the real world recognize that capitalism is a brutally inhumane system.

Unfortunately, most people do not hold the wealth/power. Those who do are doing quite well under capitalism, thank you very much. And it's not just the Republican Party's leaders, elected officials, and their wealthy donors who fall into the latter category.

November 14, 2017

Plenty of Democratic voters hold socialist or close-to-socialist views. I'm one of them.

And you can goddamn bet that there a hell of a lot more than just the Millennial Democratic voters like me who have (democratic) socialist views. After all, Bernie Sanders received 13 million votes last year in the Democratic Party's presidential primaries. Do you seriously believe that all of those were Russia-sponsored trolls or Bernie Bro assholes or something?

November 11, 2017

Trump: "People will die" because of the Russia investigation (Video in thread).

November 10, 2017

Republicans/right-wingers live in a different world/reality/universe.

For the right-wing millionaires and billionaires, it manifest in terms of who they associate with at their country clubs and Chamber of Commerce meetings or wherever else, the social and economic backgrounds that they came from, where they went to school and where they send their children to school, the neighborhoods in which they live, and so on and so forth.

For the rest, a lot of it is friends, family, church, media sources, and the kinds of places in which they live..rural/exurban environments in the South/Sun Belt, the heartlands of the Plains states and the Midwest, Appalachia, and lots of the interior in general - particularly in (again) low-density rural areas and small towns/cities.

And (importantly): the whiter these communities and the social networks in which these right-wingers live...well, do I really need to explain that one?

November 10, 2017

"The Kochs might have disavowed Trump, but in several important respects he was their natural heir."

"The Kochs might have disavowed Trump, but in several important respects he was their natural heir and the unintended consequence of the extraordinary political movement they had underwritten since the 1970s. For forty years, they had vilified the very idea of government. They had propagated that message through the countless think tanks, academic programs, front groups, ad campaigns, legal organizations, lobbyists, and candidates they supported. It was hard not to believe that this had helped set the table for the takeover of the world’s most powerful country by a man who made his inexperience and antipathy toward governing among his top selling points."

- from the Preface to the 2017 edition of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer.

PS: Read Mayer's book, if you haven't yet, and do it ASAP. It will shake you to the core, and damage or destroy any beliefs you might (still) have about American democracy, equality, opportunity, fairness, or justice to the core. And that is PAINFUL, but it is necessary to face the cold-blooded truth about where we are - and where we're still going.

November 10, 2017

OK, I get it now. I apologize. Fuck anyone who defends Trump, Moore, or any of these pieces of shit.

Sorry if I've been too grouchy and a bit of a dick here lately, but yeah...fuck these disgustingly self-entitled predators.

I hope more and more women (and men) wake up. Actually, from what I've been seeing, this has in fact been the case. Democrats just won some big, much-needed, and much-welcomed victories in this month's elections. That's legitimately very good news.

People are waking up, and it's only growing. And those already up aren't going back to bed, that's for damn sure.

Anyway, fuck President Donnie Dumbass and all the other Republicans, Nazis, "alt-righters",and Russian trolls/bots/spies, whatever. And fuck all of the racists and all of the misogynistic creeps, and those who hurt black and brown people, immigrants, women, children, LGBTQ folks, those with disabilities of any kind, the homeless, the marginalized, the poor, the working class - whether on an individual or collective level. Preaching to the choir a bit there, huh?

November 10, 2017

Remember when the Moral Majority people were moral?

Yeah, me neither.

November 9, 2017

Economic Nationalism and the Half-Life of Deindustrialization

Interesting...

In places like Youngstown, many people still remember what life was like when employment was high, jobs paid well, workers were protected by strong unions, and industrial labor provided a source of pride – not only because it produced tangible goods but also because it was recognized as challenging, dangerous, and important. The memory of what it felt like to transform raw ore into steel pipes and to be part of the connected, prosperous community that work generated still haunts the children and grandchildren of those workers. They long for the sense of purpose that industrial labor brought, even as they stock shelves at Walmart, wait tables at Applebee’s, and try to persuade strangers to make donations from a cubicle at the local call center. They resent not only the instability of largely part-time jobs with uncertain schedules and below-the-poverty-line wages but also the politicians and experts who insist that they should either stop whining, go to college (which for most would involve taking on significant debt), or move away from their homes and families to someplace with more and better jobs. Even more, they resent the educated big city elites who view them as exotic or foolish holdouts from a bygone era. That resentment emerged as support for populism in the 2016 election, and for too many it fuels racist and anti-immigrant positions.

In our 2002 book Steeltown USA: Work and Memory in Youngstown, we wrote that Youngstown’s story was America’s story. That seems even more true today, as Americans struggle to adapt to the growing precarity of work and to a changed political landscape. As Youngstown marks the 40th anniversary of its first major mill closing, people here understand that deindustrialization did not end in 1977, or even in 1982, when Youngstown Sheet and Tube closed the last of its local mills. They know that deindustrialization has a half-life. Like toxic waste, its potency decreases slowly, and it continues to cause harm – to individuals, to communities, and, as Americans increasingly recognize, to the nation as a whole.

Yet it is also worth remembering this: the first response to Black Monday in 1977 was not despair or resentment. It was activism. Busloads of local residents went to Washington to demand assistance from the government. Churches, civic groups, banks, and unions worked together to devise a plan for the community to buy and manage the mills. That part of local memory has faded, but the populism it reflected has returned.

Like the economic changes since the late 1970s, the politics of resentment will not disappear any time soon. New technologies and artificial intelligence will likely displace even more Americans, and workers no longer buy old promises about creative destruction or the great potential of a knowledge economy. The memory of an era when working-class jobs were good jobs has not yet faded, but neither has the hope that new policies will bring back good jobs. In the half-life of deindustrialization, Bannon may be right that traditional party affiliations will give way to a political contest between right-wing and left-wing populist movements, each promising – as so many politicians have before – to create real change for working people.

https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2017/10/30/economic-nationalism-and-the-half-life-of-deindustrialization/

November 8, 2017

Class bigotry is toxic no matter how much you think you're fighting racism by espousing it.

And lower-to-middle-income, working class white men and women are still a large chunk of reliable voters - especially in many of the states that actually matter in deciding the Electoral College.

I'd strongly advise against giving Trump and his base more ammunition on this and other fronts.

November 7, 2017

We may not really have many true freedoms in the US, but we certainly have plenty of Free Dumbs!

(At least, some of us do.)

Definition of Free Dumb: The freedom to be mind-numbingly dumb without consequence.

Hell, with any luck - say, the extraordinary good fortune to be a rich white guy from a rich white family - your Free Dumbs can get you very far in life indeed.

Ya just gotta play your cards right; for playing a Trump Card in the “game” of Free Dumb just might get you elected President of the whole damn country.

Profile Information

Gender: Male
Hometown: CA
Home country: USA
Member since: Wed Jan 18, 2012, 11:29 PM
Number of posts: 5,714

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