A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What does it mean for US Democratic Presidential candidates that UK Labor candidate Jeremy Corbyn led Labor to its biggest defeat in decades? For those of you who haven’t been following closely, Corbyn is no neoliberal shill. He is an unabashed lefty socialist who campaigned on an unabashed lefty socialist platform. No triangulating or “Tory lite” for him. He was out to prove that Labor could win by promising the voters a soaring lefty agenda filled with taxing the rich, taking back control of privatized industries, free college, huge infrastructure spending, more money for health care, and so forth.
The result was a mind-boggling defeat. So what does this tell us about American presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders? Corbyn lost because he was a hard left candidate, and the same thing will happen if Democrats nominate one of their own.
The American and British electorates have voted quite similarly for the past several decades, putting in office Reagan-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump as against Thatcher-Blair-Cameron-Boris Johnson. Given the similarities between Boris Johnson and Trump, as well as the obvious salience of immigration politics in both countries, I’d be reluctant to blow off the British results as nothing much for US Democrats to worry about.
More at www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/12/too-bad-about-the-brits-but-wha
t-does-it-mean-for-us/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Quote:
What does it mean for US Democratic Presidential candidates that UK Labor candidate Jeremy Corbyn led Labor to its biggest defeat in decades?
I'll answer that question by pointing out flawed logic in the first sentence of the author's second paragraph.
Quote:
The result was a mind-boggling defeat.
The defeat wasn't mind-boggling. It was easy to predict.
Quote:
I’d be reluctant to blow off the British results as nothing much for US Democrats to worry about.
As well you should.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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It can only be assumed at this point, with Daisy Ridley's recent interview with the The Guardian saying that everyone has a problem with "BoJo", and every "sane" person has a problem with Trump, that the Hollywoodesque elites in the UK behave as poorly in general and talk down to everybody over there the same way they constantly do here.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/dec/07/daisy-ridley-jj-abrams-st
ar-wars-a-religion
People have had enough of that shit.
Anthony Hopkins gets it.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/anthony-ho
pkins-brad-pitt-actors-stupid-two-popes-once-upon-a-time-a9233926.html
Quote:
The actor, 81, sat down with his Meet Joe Black and Legends of the Fall co-star for a lengthy chat for Interview magazine ahead of the release of his new Netflix film The Two Popes, when he called those in the acting profession “stupid”.
He said: “People ask me questions about present situations in life, and I say, ‘I don’t know, I’m just an actor. I don’t have any opinions. Actors are pretty stupid. My opinion is not worth anything. There’s no controversy for me, so don’t engage me in it, because I’m not going to participate’.”
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Oh...
Sorry Daisy.
This just in (12 minutes ago)
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/13/world/europe/uk-election-brexit.htm
l
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:You don't remember the 1972 election: Nixon versus George McGovern.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The defeat wasn't mind-boggling. It was easy to predict.Quote:
I’d be reluctant to blow off the British results as nothing much for US Democrats to worry about.
As well you should.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McGovern#1972_presidential_campai
gn
McGovern ran on a platform that advocated withdrawal from the Vietnam War, the only correct move according to people who weren't liars or ignorant about military strategy. The Vietnam War was the biggest, most obvious fiasco in history, and yet voters let it run. They were thinking that Peace with Honor was just around the corner in Vietnam. That was NOT true.
More than half of all voters in 1972 and more than half today can't understand a fiasco like Vietnam, nor can they understand a fiasco like Afghanistan, nor global warming, nor the Crash of 2008, nor the American healthcare system. The vast majority of voters will reject Presidential candidates such as McGovern, who actually knew in detail how things need to be changed for the better. Instead, they vote for hardcore liars like Nixon who knew nothing.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You don't remember the 1972 election: Nixon versus George McGovern.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The defeat wasn't mind-boggling. It was easy to predict.Quote:
I’d be reluctant to blow off the British results as nothing much for US Democrats to worry about.
As well you should.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McGovern#1972_presidential_campai
gn
McGovern ran on a platform that advocated withdrawal from the Vietnam War, the only correct move according to people who weren't liars or ignorant about military strategy. The Vietnam War was the biggest, most obvious fiasco in history, and yet voters let it run. They were thinking that Peace with Honor was just around the corner in Vietnam. That was NOT true.
More than half of all voters in 1972 and more than half today can't understand a fiasco like Vietnam, nor can they understand a fiasco like Afghanistan, nor global warming, nor the Crash of 2008, nor the American healthcare system. The vast majority of voters will reject Presidential candidates such as McGovern, who actually knew in detail how things need to be changed for the better. Instead, they vote for hardcore liars like Nixon who knew nothing.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
People voted for Obama. Twice.
All of those things got worse under his watch.
I think at this point, people don't know what to do and figure that if everybody is going to lie to them everyday at least vote for the guy or gal who tells them the lies they want to hear.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
What does it mean for US Democratic Presidential candidates that UK Labor candidate Jeremy Corbyn led Labor to its biggest defeat in decades? For those of you who haven’t been following closely, Corbyn is no neoliberal shill. He is an unabashed lefty socialist who campaigned on an unabashed lefty socialist platform. No triangulating or “Tory lite” for him. He was out to prove that Labor could win by promising the voters a soaring lefty agenda filled with taxing the rich, taking back control of privatized industries, free college, huge infrastructure spending, more money for health care, and so forth.
The result was a mind-boggling defeat. So what does this tell us about American presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders? Corbyn lost because he was a hard left candidate, and the same thing will happen if Democrats nominate one of their own.
The American and British electorates have voted quite similarly for the past several decades, putting in office Reagan-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump as against Thatcher-Blair-Cameron-Boris Johnson. Given the similarities between Boris Johnson and Trump, as well as the obvious salience of immigration politics in both countries, I’d be reluctant to blow off the British results as nothing much for US Democrats to worry about.
It means that Labor chose the wrong hill to die on.
The Labor Party has a big split in it: It consists of young Londoners who like to vacation in the EU and who think of themselves as "world citizens" (as if there was such a thing! Tell me, oh "world citizen", where do you go to VOTE for your "world government"? The notion is idiotic and undemocratic, just like the EU.), and working class people in the north who deeply resent having to compete with poor Poles and other immigrants in a hollowed-out economy. (As a point of comparison, the DNC stopped representing working people a long time ago. )
And just as an FYI, this "world government" agenda is supported by the most anti-labor faction of all: The City of London, (not London, which is a city, but the City of London Corporation, where all the banks are. One square mile of government entirely onto itself, where banks are citizens and even the Queen doesn't rule. https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/pages/default.aspx )
Labor gave voters the wrong choice: FREE SHIT OR SELF RULE. If they had offered both, they would have won in a blowout.
Why did Labor choose this hill to die on? It was entirely unnecessary because it didn't represent their core mission, which is to represent LABOR. (Their name should have reminded them!)
It's like the Democratic Party shoehorning in the socalled "Patriot Act" into a budget resolution: It was entirely unnnecessary and totally voluntary, but for some reason they thought it extremely urgent to shred your Constitutional protections continuously, without even a 15-day gap. Who the fuck were they representing when they did THAT?
Anyway, the irony is that Jeremy Corbyn is apparently personally pro-Brexit, but he was forced to represent the Labor MPs who are a bunch of jackasss and twits.
And there's no guarantee that BoJo will bring in a real Brexit.
*****
There isn't a clear parallel to what's happening in the USA, because the parties don't represent the same things. But there IS an overall dissolution of these large non-democratic multinational governing structures and an overall resurgence of nationalism. And a good thing, too, since we have all only gotten poorer and less free under them, seeing as they really represent transnational banks, transnational financiers, transnational manufacturers and transnational tech companies.
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Eart
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. . . in just the past 24 hours the response to the British election results has changed a lot. At first there were a fair number of folks who thought the results might hold a lesson or two for American progressives, but over the course of a few hours most of them seem to have been bullied into adopting the view that, hey, Britain is a different country with its own distinct issues. It’s stupid to think it’s similar in any way to what’s happening in America.
And sure, there’s no question that you should be cautious about blithely drawing parallels. At the same time, come on, folks. Britain and the US are both part of the Anglosphere and have related political cultures. What’s more, if you dive even slightly below the surface there enough specific similarities in our current situations that you really have to put your head in the sand not to notice them. The recent victories of Brexit and Donald Trump were both largely driven by white working-class panic over immigration. Trump and Boris Johnson are both buffoonish, ideologically flexible populists who are allegedly unpopular but who somehow get lots of votes anyway. In both countries, the progressive opposition won nice victories recently and were feeling good. Also in both cases, the progressive opposition has been moving to the left for several years: Jeremy Corbyn may have been a uniquely unlikeable party leader, but it’s hard to deny that at least part of the reason for his big loss is that he ran on a manifesto far to the left of the typical Labour leader. This is exactly the same thing that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are trying to do in the US, and both of them share Corbyn’s rigid distaste for any kind of politically useful weaseling.
So . . . yes, centrist types should be careful not to overstate the lessons we might take from Labour’s loss. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, although America in 2020 might not end up as a repeat of Britain in 2019, it will probably rhyme. It doesn’t do much good to close our eyes and pretend there’s just nothing there.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/12/america-in-2020-will-probably-r
hyme-with-britain-in-2019/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Selling Keynesianism
In the 1940s and ’50s, the general public understood and agreed upon Keynesian economic principles. Today, we can learn a lot from the popularizing efforts that led to that consensus and long-lasting economic success.
As Marriner S. Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 to 1948, put it, “as mass production economy has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth . . . to provide men with buying power equal to the amount of goods and services offered by the nation’s economic machinery.” In Bowles’s formulation, “the redistribution of income is a subject which many people find distasteful to talk about — much less to do something about. But talk about it and do something about it we must, because this is not a matter of taste; it is a matter of national economic necessity.”
The key point is that businesses will only produce when there is demand for their products, otherwise they will shutter their facilities and lay off their workers. Because high-income people spend a smaller share of their earnings than low-income people do, high levels of income inequality result in lower levels of aggregate demand, the forerunner to recession and unemployment. Bowles demonstrated this logic by taking it to its extreme:
Let us suppose that one percent of the population were to receive 95 percent of our entire national income, with the remaining 5 percent spread among the rest of us. Could our system—could any system—work on that basis? One percent of the people couldn’t possibly consume 95 percent of all the goods and services which the rest of us could produce.
The long-lasting prosperity of the 1940s and ’50s thus owed, in large part, to the fact that the general public broadly understood and agreed upon the economic principle that fast-paced growth and high employment could be achieved on the back of consumer demand, but only if purchasing power was distributed widely enough.
Once armed with this information, the general public went about enforcing it. As Lizabeth Cohen documents in A Consumer’s Republic (2003), labor unions cited the importance of maintaining high demand through widely distributed purchasing power to justify their calls for higher wages. As George Meany, secretary-treasurer of the AFL, put it in 1944, “we have the machinery to build all of the automobiles, all of the radios, washing machines and such things; we have the workers to build all of the houses that we could possibly use. But we will not make those things unless there is purchasing power available to buy them.”
More at http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/robert-manduca-selling-keynes
ianism
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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This is something of a misunderstanding of Keynesianism. He wasn't an advocate of wealth redistribution or even government spending as much as increasing the money supply thru lowered interest rates. It was FDR's economic advisor who believed in "pump priming" thru government spending on public works.
In any case, Keynesianism only works in closed systems, where money supply can be efectively corraled into "an" economy. You can see why this is so by imagining that every USA family gets a $10,000 of "helicopter money" ... money dropped on them by government (deficit spending). What happens to that $10,000? Well, some will be spent on goods and services provided by the USA economy leading to an increase in jobs at home, but much will be spent on goods imported from abroad: consumer electronics and housewares manufactured in China; clothes from Haiti, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines; leather goods from Bangladesh etc. So money distributed in the USA would only partially increase jobs in the USA.
Keynes eventually took up the issue of TRADE IMBALANCES. He was NOT a believer of "free trade" but tried to achieve a system where international trade was regulated to eliminate these trade imbalances. This is not the system that we have today, nor i it the one espoused by the proponents of MMT (which is not Keynsianism).
-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
I'd nuke a BILLION PEOPLE if it would save the other 7 billion from living under Putin. Hell, I might go all the way to the last 100 people on Earth to keep this planet from being under fascist rule.- WISHIMAY
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Sounds to me like every dollar you own is like stock in a company that is constantly being split, but you're not getting that split and they're giving it to somebody else.
Makes it even worse when you realize that we're just giving it away to places like the Ukraine.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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