Trump Trainwreck - Ongoing diary of betrayal and evil

[Galen]

(12-07-2016, 02:36 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(12-07-2016, 03:58 AM)Galen Wrote:

(12-06-2016, 02:34 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(12-06-2016, 10:32 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(12-06-2016, 04:04 AM)Galen Wrote: You don't really understand the magnitude of the problem I suggest that you find out the size of the regulatory burden in the US.  If you are unfortunate enough to be in California its much worse.  This is the result of an unelected bureaucracy that is out of control.

The regulatory burden exists because the free market does nothing to prevent such deeds as toxic dumping, adulteration of foodstuffs, dishonesty in disclosure of financial statements, inducing workers to do unpaid overtime off the clock, asking female employees from offering themselves as fringe benefits to male bosses... Regulation exists because human nature is flawed, and because abuses in the past have obliged government responsible to the People to control those who wield economic power.

If Humanity were invariably good then we would need no regulation -- or police, courts of law, or prisons.

Bingo. That is why I support it. I care about the planet.

You really have no idea how insane its getting here in the US and the bureaucrats get  pretty arbitrary.

I am for regulation that works. Not too much, not too little. Keep it workable and simple.

Look up Robert Higgs and his work on regime uncertainty.  It will not only help you understand the present but also why the Great Depression lasted as long as it did.

[pbrower2a]

(12-07-2016, 03:08 PM)Galen Wrote:

(12-07-2016, 02:36 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(12-07-2016, 03:58 AM)Galen Wrote:

(12-06-2016, 02:34 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(12-06-2016, 10:32 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: The regulatory burden exists because the free market does nothing to prevent such deeds as toxic dumping, adulteration of foodstuffs, dishonesty in disclosure of financial statements, inducing workers to do unpaid overtime off the clock, asking female employees from offering themselves as fringe benefits to male bosses... Regulation exists because human nature is flawed, and because abuses in the past have obliged government responsible to the People to control those who wield economic power.

If Humanity were invariably good then we would need no regulation -- or police, courts of law, or prisons.

Bingo. That is why I support it. I care about the planet.

You really have no idea how insane its getting here in the US and the bureaucrats get  pretty arbitrary.

I am for regulation that works. Not too much, not too little. Keep it workable and simple.

Look up Robert Higgs and his work on regime uncertainty.  It will not only help you understand the present but also why the Great Depression lasted as long as it did.

The article.

My critique:

Start with the severity of the three-year economic meltdown beginning in the autumn of 1929.  Going into it, economic inequality was severe by any standard until the Double-Zero Decade, which itself culminated in an economic meltdown that for a year and a half was similarly severe.

I saw the chart showing the connection between gross private investment* (note: not a standard measure in economics!) and GDP. Because the axes are not proportional, I note that gross private investment dipped to roughly one fifth of its 1929 value that in 1932 while GDP fell by about a third. It's arguable that economic production beyond that necessary for bare survival practically disappeared within three years.

It's easy to see why people who might otherwise have invested did not do so. Seeing nothing but economic decline, seeing business failure upon business failure, and perhaps seeing better opportunity to pick up productive assets at fire-sale prices than to make expensive investments ion new plant and equipment, investors could wait and see how bad things would get.

For that one cannot blame the New Deal, as it had yet to take place. People had even bigger things to fear, like a Socialist insurrection or a fascist takeover (neither of which materialized)**. The interpretation of the Great Depression as a uniformly-bad time is undue. I see the graph and notice that by 1937 GDP is roughly back to where it was in 1929 and was ahead of where it had been in 1929 by 1939.  The time from 1933 to 1939 was a growth-based recovery. America could not get back to a line of growth as one might have seen it in the late 1920s.

Note that I observe from my encounters with people who lived through both the late 1920s and late 1930s: that few people wanted a return to the economic conditions of the late 1920s by about 1936. By 1936 the speculative boom of the 1920s got blamed for the recent hard times. By the late 1930s Americans had more consumer goods, clearly indicating that things were better in the late 1930s than in the supposed halcyon days of the late 1920s.

Of course the people who told me this (they are practically all gone now -- but I paid attention to my elders when I was a kid because I thought that I might hear something worth learning)  were such people as farmers, factory workers, schoolteachers, and the like -- and not the 'economic royalists' who may have never recovered from the Market Crash. For most people putting food on the table, maybe having a car, refrigerator, modern stove, or a radio for the first time mattered far more than that some 'right people' got what they wanted first. In the current decade, the 'economic royalists' got what they wanted first and have ensured no material progress for others. That's the difference between having the economic royalists in charge of Congress with the aid of their obedient stooges in most of this decade and having politicians who really paid attention to the common man in the 1930s.

The consequence of a financial panic is the recognition of the loss of wealth after a corrupt boom devoured it. Wasted investments, as in the middle-to-late 1920s and the middle-to-late Double-Zero Decade, don't get recovered. The escape from a severe recession or an outright depression is growth from the low point of the economic downturn, and not a swift return to the economic appearance of the alleged good times before the meltdown.

I notice the graph of 'gross private investment' tracking the GDP rather closely, except during World War II. It may be a quibble to decide whether American expenditures in World War II were enhanced consumption that went to supplying soldiers in the battlefields of land, air, and sea or an investment in keeping American assets from becoming property of fascist war criminals and American labor from becoming serfs and slaves... you may interpret such at your choice. But defeating the Third Reich and Thug Japan was clearly the right thing to do, and if it meant that Americans could not fully participate in a consumer society, then so be it. We would get to enjoy far greater prosperity after WWII than after the pale recovery of the late 1930s.

For me to predict what follows when the Economic Royalists, of which Donald Trump is the most blatant example, have complete control over American political life is likely to express my fears (the gain and mass sacrifices will go into conspicuous spending redolent of oil sheikhs that does not trickle down) or your hope (that the gain and mass sacrifices will go into conspicuous spending redolent of oil sheikhs that no patriotic American can complain about for not trickling down). Of course I expect four of the dreariest and potentially most dangerous years in American history with no precedent since the Civil War.

I can come up with some quotes on how a grossly-unjust America will work. I need not cite Karl Marx. Abraham Lincoln in his excoriation of slavery will be far more apt for my purposes.

Uncertainty goes with the territory of any investor. Mass consumption, and not elite indulgence, drives the economy.

*What is so bad about public investment except for its unreliability? Just think of the tax-funded Interstate Highway System which may have kept the American economy humming along. Its building devoured huge amounts of industrial production in steel, asphalt, and concrete. Once segments were completed the freeway system, at least in rural areas, made possible a significant private investment in roadside services as motels, automobile service stations, and restaurants. The unreliability is boom-and-bust, which is the norm for investment of any kind.

It was certainly better than the private investment in the real-estate scams of the Double-Zero Decade.

**Saving the system from a catastrophic overthrow of the social order is a good idea. The best way to save what is good in a social order is to reform the rest.

[Odin]

(12-07-2016, 03:52 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(12-07-2016, 03:08 PM)Galen Wrote:

(12-07-2016, 02:36 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(12-07-2016, 03:58 AM)Galen Wrote:

(12-06-2016, 02:34 PM)taramarie Wrote: Bingo. That is why I support it. I care about the planet.

You really have no idea how insane its getting here in the US and the bureaucrats get  pretty arbitrary.

I am for regulation that works. Not too much, not too little. Keep it workable and simple.

Look up Robert Higgs and his work on regime uncertainty.  It will not only help you understand the present but also why the Great Depression lasted as long as it did.

sorry but if you want NO regulation on anything I will have to disagree with you there.

He's an ideologue, no use reasoning with him.

[Odin]

Trump's going to put a climate change denying big oil tool as head of the EPA. The entire planet is now well and truly fucked.

[Eric the Green]

(12-07-2016, 04:36 PM)Odin Wrote: Trump's going to put a climate change denying big oil tool as head of the EPA. The entire planet is now well and truly fucked.

So much for his conversation with Al Gore too.

[Odin]

(12-07-2016, 05:58 PM)taramarie Wrote: I prefer to not close the door on people if I can help it.

The thing with Libertarian extremists like him is that they are absolutist, black-and-white thinkers. A lot of them come from technical, engineering, and scientific backgrounds where such thinking is fine, but can lead to absurd conclusions when practically applied to human societies. Galen is basically trying to imply that since regulations will always have some issues with red tape BS there should be no regulations. It's bonkers thinking to anyone with a bit of common sense.

[Odin]

Trump went on a Twitter hissy fit denouncing the union boss of the Carrier plant for calling him out as a liar and a fraud. According to Reddit the union boss is already getting death threats from Trump's loyal thugs.

EDIT: Trump also blamed the workers for their jobs getting sent to Mexico. Fucking hypocritical POS. Fuck him. FUCK HIM.

[pbrower2a]

(12-08-2016, 08:12 AM)Odin Wrote:

(12-07-2016, 05:58 PM)taramarie Wrote: I prefer to not close the door on people if I can help it.

The thing with Libertarian extremists like him is that they are absolutist, black-and-white thinkers. A lot of them come from technical, engineering, and scientific backgrounds where such thinking is fine, but can lead to absurd conclusions when practically applied to human societies. Galen is basically trying to imply that since regulations will always have some issues with red tape BS there should be no regulations. It's bonkers thinking to anyone with a bit of common sense.

The absolute black-and-white thinkers of course ignore the complexity of human reality. STEM activities must act in absolute black-and-white  choices as 'accept or deny', 'prove or reject', 'build or not build'.  Science and technology typically inform big projects like dam construction and bridge building in which huge amounts of material and large numbers of workers are necessary and any failure can be catastrophic or at the least financially ruinous. The incrementalism in building a stretch of superhighway is best described as 'percentage of completion'. Many other things, like small businesses, can be expanded incrementally. A dam cannot.

Much of the rest of life, from art to human relations, requires some subtlety and tolerance for some ambiguity. Drama and poetry would fail if all meanings of words were cut and dried. Even something so basic as love remains more complex than an explanation of how stars generate electromagnetic energy.

[David Horn]

(12-07-2016, 09:49 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(12-06-2016, 05:36 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-05-2016, 03:56 PM)Galen Wrote:

(12-05-2016, 03:49 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: ... We need those regulations...

No we don't.

Take just a minute and look at the map of the worst superfund sites, all the direct result of too little regulation. 



Note that none of them were or will be cleaned-up by the ones who did the polluting, or even at their expense.  After all, no one said no.

There was too little regulation when they were created, and too much regulation now.  Those two things are not contradictory.

How do you thread the needle?  How do you know when the "too much" threshold is crossed?  Remember, it isn't just the EPA, though the effort to kill that is underway.  Deregulated banking nearly killed the entire world economy, yet the bankers got off (after all, no one said no) even though the rest of us are still taking a beating.  The Telecoms and Big Pharma set their own prices ... take it or leave it.  And don't get me started on the mythical benefits of Right to Work Laws, pursued solely for the benefit of employers. 

The history of the last 30 or 40 years is not good.  Too much regulation is not the problem.  Too little ... maybe.

[David Horn]

(12-07-2016, 02:36 PM)taramarie Wrote: I am for regulation that works. Not too much, not too little. Keep it workable and simple.

Unfortunately, with lawyers standing-by to fight every regulatory issue, workable and simple are mutually exclusive.  I wish it was otherwise.

[David Horn]

(12-07-2016, 04:36 PM)Odin Wrote: Trump's going to put a climate change denying big oil tool as head of the EPA. The entire planet is now well and truly fucked.

He may add to the damage by appointing Rex Tillerson (CEO of ExxonMobile) to head State.  He's already bailing on the Paris Accords, so why not just finish the job. 

[Eric the Green]

Quite a crew the Trumpster is assembling:

[pbrower2a]

(12-08-2016, 09:19 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Quite a crew the Trumpster is assembling:

...and his appointee for Secretary of Labor is a fast-food executive. Now we know how there will be so many jobs: the jobs won't pay enough to live on!

I wish that I had the means with which to emigrate. I am beginning to understand what anti-Castro Cubans went through. Donald Trump makes me wish that I had taken up chain smoking as a youth so that I would be dead from a smoking-related ailment by now.

[playwrite]

(12-07-2016, 12:48 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(12-06-2016, 01:30 PM)playwrite Wrote:

(12-06-2016, 04:04 AM)Galen Wrote:

(12-05-2016, 06:15 PM)taramarie Wrote: "We need those regulations. Without them the people and the planet suffer for the sake of elites' profits."

I actually agree with Eric on this.

You don't really understand the magnitude of the problem I suggest that you find out the size of the regulatory burden in the US.  If you are unfortunate enough to be in California its much worse.  This is the result of an unelected bureaucracy that is out of control.

Ah, having the POTUS deciding which individual companies (Carrier) will get a tax cut and which will not (Trane, American Standard, Rheem Lennox, etc. ) is the utmost in regulating.  Remember, "government shouldn't decide the winners and losers; that's the job of the markets!"

I always thought Libertarians/Austrians could be bought off, I just didn't realize how cheap.  It's down to around 800 Carrier jobs saved which is lost in the noise of weekly employment gains/loses.  

You should at least consider removing that laissez faire quote from your signature line - such clear hypocrisy has to be just a tad embarrassing, no?

I thought the Democrats were suppose to be the ones who cared about American workers more than they cared about corporate profits. Do you own stock in Carrier?

The Carrier jobs "saved" is now below 800.  Every week, there are between 200,000 to 300,000 new jobless claims.  What Trump did was not even a drop in the buck.  It was a publicity stunt by a con man.  Google "Buy American" to see the 10s of thousands of jobs the GOP just voted to kill.  Dems care about jobs, GOP care only about their own 1 percent income levels by conning you Trump Chumps.

[playwrite]

(12-07-2016, 04:06 AM)Galen Wrote:

(12-06-2016, 01:30 PM)playwrite Wrote:

(12-06-2016, 04:04 AM)Galen Wrote:

(12-05-2016, 06:15 PM)taramarie Wrote: "We need those regulations. Without them the people and the planet suffer for the sake of elites' profits."

I actually agree with Eric on this.

You don't really understand the magnitude of the problem I suggest that you find out the size of the regulatory burden in the US.  If you are unfortunate enough to be in California its much worse.  This is the result of an unelected bureaucracy that is out of control.

Ah, having the POTUS deciding which individual companies (Carrier) will get a tax cut and which will not (Trane, American Standard, Rheem Lennox, etc. ) is the utmost in regulating.  Remember, "government shouldn't decide the winners and losers; that's the job of the markets!"

I always thought Libertarians/Austrians could be bought off, I just didn't realize how cheap.  It's down to around 800 Carrier jobs saved which is lost in the noise of weekly employment gains/loses.  

You should at least consider removing that laissez faire quote from your signature line - such clear hypocrisy has to be just a tad embarrassing, no?

I am pretty sure that I wrote somewhere else that I wasn't very happy about it.  On the other hand, being President-Elect means that he needed the help of Pence to make it happen.  Truth is, you should have been concerned about the Imperial Presidency when Obozo was running things but it just fine when its your guy doing what you want.  I thing Scott Adams has it about right where the Carrier deal is concerned.  Time will tell, it always does.

First, I'm not the guy with laissez faire in my signature line.

Second, you need to look up imperial and maybe read a few history books if you believe a term-limited president is imperial in general and a guy specifically who both has been trying to extract us from two wars he did not start and who has been effectively blocked by Congress including his legitimate appointment of his SCOTUS nominee.

Third, the only thing that time will tell is if you can rise above your hypocrisy to grasp the threat Trump poses for the values you have so often expressed.  Words are easy.

P.S. Scot is a cartoonist, not a businessman.  At best Trump had some plan to make a mark at an emotional level.  On Wall Street it's called pumpinG the rubes.  And just like how a stock collapses when the con is over and there's no underlying value, the Trump Chumps will be left holding the bag.

[Cynic Hero '86]

Playwrite: Most Xers and Millies opposed the Iraq war (and Afghanistan after Bin Laden was killed) because boomers refused to allow the troops to fight with the gloves OFF. They did not oppose it over pacifism. There would have been much more support (and much more zeal for fighting) had such things such as pacification operations and terror-as-deterrence operations been allowed to occur rather than being blocked by boombers for purely ideological reasons.

Historical examples of How Xers and Millies wanted to fight:

https://theremustbejustice.files.wordpre...masakr.jpg

https://theremustbejustice.files.wordpre...aljevo.jpg

Other Historical Examples of the same methods:

http://www.ww2incolor.com/d/37442-7/784_...gfoto_2010

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Vf4E5Nurnfw/V...4f18c3.jpg

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/05/2...34x405.jpg

Reenactment Representations of gloves off methods:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsqVqn5B2LE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2P-4_EWtSc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VDIlcTPsSQ

[playwrite]

(12-09-2016, 02:21 PM)Cynic Hero Wrote: Playwrite: Most Xers and Millies opposed the Iraq war (and Afghanistan after Bin Laden was killed) because boomers refused to allow the troops to fight with the gloves OFF. They did not oppose it over pacifism. There would have been much more support (and much more zeal for fighting) had such things such as pacification operations and terror-as-deterrence operations been allowed to occur rather than being blocked by boombers for purely ideological reasons.

Historical examples of How Xers and Millies wanted to fight:

https://theremustbejustice.files.wordpre...masakr.jpg

https://theremustbejustice.files.wordpre...aljevo.jpg

Other Historical Examples of the same methods:

http://www.ww2incolor.com/d/37442-7/784_...gfoto_2010

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Vf4E5Nurnfw/V...4f18c3.jpg

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/05/2...34x405.jpg

Reenactment Representations of gloves off methods:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsqVqn5B2LE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2P-4_EWtSc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VDIlcTPsSQ

Complete and utter horseshit from a chickenhawk who's never been in a kill or be killed sitution for their country.

At least your zombie apocalpyse fantasies are humorous.  Go pedal these genocidal wetdreams with someone else.

[playwrite]

Remember how the Trump Chumps got all outraged over Clinton's 30 minute speech to Goldman Sachs bankers?

Remember how the Trump Chumps fled Ted Cruz when The Donald tweeted about Ted's wife being a Goldman Sachs employee?

Trump now has two Goldman Sachs alumni as his top economic Cabinet nominees and another as his top political WH advisor.

Have you heard one inkling from the Trump Chumps about this? No?

And why is that? Well, because they are Trump Chumps.

[Odin]

(12-10-2016, 09:38 AM)playwrite Wrote: Remember how the Trump Chumps got all outraged over Clinton's 30 minute speech to Goldman Sachs bankers?  

Remember how the Trump Chumps fled Ted Cruz when The Donald tweeted about Ted's wife being a Goldman Sachs employee?

Trump now has two Goldman Sachs alumni as his top economic Cabinet nominees and another as his top political WH advisor.

Have you heard one inkling from the Trump Chumps about this?  No?  

And why is that?  Well, because they are Trump Chumps.

It's a cult, they are already denying that Trump said that The Wall was going to be an actual wall. It's positively Orwellian. "We've always been at war with Eastasia!"

Though the Republicans have been doing this Orwellian BS for a while. I went off on a poster on Reddit's /r/PoliticalDiscussion board who posted some drivel about how the Republicans were "always" the party of "small government" before Bush Sr. and the ADA and Jr. and Medicare Part D, when in reality the "small government" mythos is 100% an invention of Reagan.

[Bob Butler 54]

(12-09-2016, 02:21 PM)Cynic Hero Wrote: Playwrite: Most Xers and Millies opposed the Iraq war (and Afghanistan after Bin Laden was killed) because boomers refused to allow the troops to fight with the gloves OFF.

I can't speak for all Boomers, just for this one, but when Bush 43's "surge" occurred as the 2008 election cycle was gearing up, there was a shift in tactics that came with it.  The early battle against the insurgency focused on killing bad guys.  As in Vietnam, the Army kept score with a body count.  It was presumed that if we killed more people than we lost, we must be winning.

With the surge, came a shift in tactics from killing Iraqis to protecting Iraqis.  They built a lot of walls and tried to protect the people within the walls.  There was no small amount of racial cleansing.  If the different tribal and religious factions lived in separate neighborhoods separated by walls with various forces covering the perimeter, the civilian deaths at least became less.  The phrase 'hearts and minds' was thrown around.  The new thought was that if you killed people, they'd get mad and try to kill you back.  If you protected people, they might start treating you as a friend.  This approach was called counterinsurgency.  It didn't pacify Iraq, but it did significantly better than the initial 'increase the bodycount' approach.

Protecting people, trying to end the fighting, might be less gratifying to the young boots on the ground than killing people.  It might be more fun, if a hostile sniper starts shooting at US troops from a village, to call in an air strike on the village.  Entertaining the troops isn't the general's job, though.  If you want to entertain the troops, you call in the USO.  If you want to end an insurgency, you use counterinsurgency tactics.

But even with the new tactics, if you are fighting an insurgency, you really want a certain ratio of occupying troops to boots on the ground.  LBJ was told that the troop level he was intending to use in Vietnam would not be sufficient if the opposition went to insurgent warfare.  LBJ went in anyway, the enemy went insurgent, and the US didn't have the will to escalate.  The exact same thing happened in Iraq.  If you don't have the will and the funds for a lot of boots on the ground, the tactics don't matter a lot, you are going to get a quagmire.  After years of trying to make it work with inadequate force, and knowing full well that they were fielding an inadequate force, even Bush 43 recognized that it was time to start bringing the troops home.

Anyway, this Boomer at least favors counterinsurgency tactics when fighting insurgencies because expending ammunition with the goal of maximizing the bodycount just helps the insurgents recruit.

Trump has talked about knowing the Middle East better than the generals and hinted that he would use more aggressive tactics.  What he has said on the campaign trail and what he is saying now don't match though.  I can easily believe that some folk think brute force will solve the problem.  It hasn't solved this sort of problem in the past, though.  I do want to see what Trump will try to do before predicting failure.  His aggressive spiels were effective enough at winning votes.  He was telling his people what they wanted to hear, suggesting he could fight a short victorious war.  

There is a large possibility of quagmire, though, if he doesn't commit a lot of force.  They committed nigh on the entire US ground force during Bush 43's years.  The were sending the reserve units back into Iraq as quick as they could refurbish and retrain.

Well, anyway, I'm dubious.