I go where the logic and numbers take me, which is why I said that Donald Trump’s economic plan will work if he actually follows it.
But Trump is beyond the pale, and I’m not talking about his support for deportations and various racists statements and policies, I’m talking about this:
The water fills the hole in the saran wrap so that there is either water or vaccum in your mouth. The water pours into your sinuses and throat. You struggle to expel water periodically by building enough pressure in your lungs. With the saran wrap though each time I expelled water, I was able to draw in less air. Finally the lungs can no longer expel water and you begin to draw it up into your respiratory tract. It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying. I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You know you are dead and it’s too late. Involuntary and total panic. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye. At the time my lungs emptied and I began to draw water, I would have sold my children to escape. There was no choice, or chance, and willpower was not involved. I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger.
…
I didn’t allow anybody else to try it on me. Inconceivable. I know I only got the barest taste of what it’s about since I was in control, and not restrained and controlling the flow of water.
But there’s no chance. No chance at all.
So, is it torture?
I’ll put it this way. If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I’d take the fingers, no question.
It’s horrible, terrible, inhuman torture. I can hardly imagine worse. I’d prefer permanent damage and disability to experiencing it again. I’d give up anything, say anything, do anything.
The Spanish Inquisition knew this. It was one of their favorite methods.
It’s torture. No question. Terrible terrible torture. To experience it and understand it and then do it to another human being is to leave the realm of sanity and humanity forever. No question in my mind.
This is the torture that Trump thinks is mild. He’d do worse things.
This is my bright red line. I don’t know where yours is, but when a regime starts torturing or raping as a matter of policy, I’m out. This is why I have no tolerance for any bullshit about Pinochet with his rape rooms and trained dogs to rape women. This is why I have no time for George Bush.
One can make lesser-evil arguments, and I have with respect to various despots–Saddam tortured, Qaddafi tortured, Assad tortures, the Egyptian regime tortures.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)
These people all cross the line. They are all evil. One can then say, “What will happen if we invade is worse,” and be right, but that does not signify approval of the regimes.
It would be easy enough to rid ourselves of such regimes if we were willing to run a rich world, where things were getting better for everyone. Look at pictures of Kabul from the 70s, or Pakistan. A world order which believes in a genuinely good ideology, which provides better futures, which doesn’t torture and rape itself can deal with such regimes. The great flaw of the post-war world was that it was offering prosperity but refused to offer it evenly to everyone (though it was better than the neo-liberal era), and certainly didn’t believe in Democracy.
Your ideology, your stories, only work properly for you if you actually fulfill their requirements.
But back to America. I don’t know if Clinton will torture. I know Bernie Sanders won’t. I know there are options available in the American election that don’t sell the tattered remains of America’s soul.
Yes, Trump’s economic plan will work, but the cost is your soul. Bernie Sanders’ economic plan will work too, and it doesn’t cost you your soul.
Let’s be explicit: For a time, fascism works. It worked in Italy, it worked in Germany.
It is time-limited, which is why Germany had to start grabbing, but it works.
You get yourself Trump, he’ll make the economy work. But his plan has leaks, like his insane tax cuts, which will show up in time. If he only wants eight years, no problem. If he wants more, he’ll have to find victims to prop up his economy. War is the ultimate stimulus, so is looting.
But he’ll be very popular. America will follow him off the cliff. They followed George W. Bush after all, and he wasn’t half as popular as Trump will be.
In the macro sense there is no free lunch. You cannot run a good industrial economy for long without determined recycling of money and without controlling the oligarchy. That means high tax rates. The only other solution is looting.
And in the meantime, Trump will be torturing people.
Americans have a real, progressive option on the domestic front. I have my problems with Sanders, but if you want a chance at a good economy without giving up all human decency, I suggest you go for him.
As for Clinton, I cannot in good conscience endorse her. I believe there is little that Clinton wouldn’t do. A woman who embraces Henry Kissinger has claimed her circle in Hell as well.
Ok folks, let’s say what people keep refusing to say:
Trump’s economic plan makes sense and will work.
Okay?
What Trump wants to do is to use tariffs to return production to the United States. He has mentioned a 35 percent tariff on cars produced in Mexico, for example.
This is not crazy, this is not insane. This is how economies were largely run for most of capitalism’s history.
If a country is running a trade deficit, that means it has more demand than it is filling domestically. If it has unused capacity, and less than full employment (both are true in the US, I would want to see the US running under 2 percent unemployment consistently for years before I was sure it was at full employment), then the stuff it is making overseas, which can be made at home, should be made at home.
Blah, blah, blah—competitive advantage. I’ve written the articles on why comparative advantage is irrelevant most of the time. Read them.
Ricardo, who created the doctrine of comparative advantage, thought that free trade did not work under the circumstances in which the US now finds itself.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)
Free trade, if you don’t have full employment, is a rounding error. In that case, the only things you should be importing are things you need which you literally can’t make yourself. And if you can’t make them because you don’t know how, you should be learning.
Free trade works when countries have full employment and capacity utilization. Only then does it make sense.
Trump wants bilateral trade deals. Country X sells America what America can’t make for itself, and America sells Country X what it can’t make for itself.
Keynes, by the way, felt that countries should produce almost all of what they needed for their daily consumption, trading only in that which they absolutely could not make and luxuries.
Trump is right.
Trump also wants full universal health care. That will free up a lot of money.
Trump wants to tax the financial industry, that will give him a lot of money.
As for his nativist policies, well deporting millions of people while at the same time not allowing the industries which hired them to leave the country will result in increased wages and employment for the working class. Immigration is a great thing, and a net economic positive, when you are running full employment and protectionist policies. If you refuse to have full employment due to deliberate government policy, well, then immigration’s so great not for the natives.
(See “How the Federal Reserve Crushed Wages for Over 30 Years.”)
As the Rolling Stone article about Trump pointed out, Trump is winning because Trump is telling a lot of truth. Other politicians are beholden to big money interests and cannot possibly work in your interest because they are already bought. (This includes Clinton, but not Sanders).
This is simply a fact.
The policies which work for ordinary people are well known: bilateral trade deals, protection of core industries, the ability to feed your own nation, tight labor markets, etc.
Trade is often a bad thing. It creates a race to the bottom, allowing countries to compete against each other for the worst wage, the worst treatment of workers, and the worst pollution. It isn’t always a bad thing, but it is best when managed, not when free, and a country is most securely prosperous when it is primarily reliant on its own domestic market.
Now Trump won’t do all of what should be done. He won’t, for example, radically raise taxes on rich people. But he despises the financial industry and will hammer them, he will put up tariffs, he will redirect domestic demand to domestic industry.
You may not like it, but Trump’s economic plan will work. It will produce a MUCH better economy for his supporters than did Obama or Bush (or even Clinton).
Can he get it through?
Well, he will be a Republican President, so presumably he will have Republican majorities in the House, Senate, and Supreme Court.
Let’s say they balk, though. After all, he will be hurting a lot of their owners.
Trump is PRESIDENT.
Most people don’t really understand what that means because Presidents rarely use their full power. Trump controls the NSA and the CIA, for example. They spy on Congress (no, don’t waste my time pretending they don’t). They either know or can find out every little bit of dirt on every member of Congress.
The vast majority of Congress members are corrupt. Again, don’t even try and deny it. They are almost all subject to corruption charges if the President wants to push it through the Justice Department. They can vote for his plans, or they can go to prison.
Now, the DOJ has immunized most of Wall Street and the Big Bankers for their crimes leading up to the 2008. Do you believe they have stopped committing crimes?
Right.
Now let’s look at the Federal Reserve: All members of the Board of the Federal Reserve, except for the Chairman, can be fired by the President for cause, i.e., not doing their job. The Federal Reserve has two mandates: controlling inflation and maintaining full employment.
Right. They buckle, or they are gone.
Now, forget all this. Watch a Trump rally. Note how he treats hecklers, how he talks of wanting to punch them, and how gives license to his supporters.
What do you think will happen to lawmakers who oppose the great Trump when they go back to their districts and encounter Trump supporters?
Context: There are many stories of working class men punching out their bosses and so on when they insulted FDR.
Trump is running as the fascist version of FDR: He’s the class traitor. He’s a billionaire who knows how the game is played, knows it is crooked, and is going to betray his own kind to work for the American people.
He will be popular. Once his economic plan works, he will be even more popular. He will be idolized by those who support him. The people who hate him most will be deported, powerless, or crawling on their belly for his approval (most of the media).
Remember, FDR improved the US economy.
But Hitler and Mussolini, they really improved Germany and Italy’s economies.
This, my friends, is why I kept warning that current elites were setting the conditions for the rise of a man on horseback, from fascism or the far left.
People will only tolerate economic failure for so long. After that they will go with anyone, and I do mean anyone, who promises that they will fix it, and who seems credible and, most importantly, not part of the elite who caused the problem in the first place.
Trump will crush Clinton if he runs against her, because she is the very essence of an entitled elitist. He will destroy her in ways you cannot even imagine. It will be ugly, really ugly, but his core critique will be the same as his core critique of Jeb: “You are part of the group that fucked up America.”
And he’s right.
Bernie, on the other hand, is not. Whether he can win against Trump, I do not know, but he is not nearly as vulnerable to the charge that he’s one of the elite, and, by the way, minus the nativism, his economic plan and Trump’s are a lot alike.
A lot.
Sanders plan will work for the same basic reasons Trump’s will work.
But people need to stop deceiving themselves. Trump is not a joke, he is not stupid, and he is not incompetent. He will almost certainly be a popular President amongst the people who voted for him, who are, by the way, the part of the population most willing to be violent.
If Trump becomes President, he may be President for a very long time.
Not precisely a surprise, or anything. Barring an airplane accident, or some such, he’s the nominee.
Most polls show him winning against Clinton (and losing against Sanders).
Get used to the idea of President Trump, it is your very possible future. If he improves the economy (quite possible, politicians and central bankers have refused to do all the obvious things to improve it), he could be your President for quite some time.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)
One of the most striking things about much of American culture is the simple meanness of it. The cruelty.
Most of this seems to come down to three feelings:
- My life sucks. I have to work a terrible job I hate in order to survive. I have to bow and scrape and do shit I don’t want to do. You should have to as well.
- Anyone who doesn’t make it must not be willing to suffer as I do, therefore anyone who doesn’t make it deserves to be homeless, go without food, and so on.
- Anybody who is against us needs to be hurt and humiliated, because that’s how I see my superiors deal with people who go against them.
“Life is shit, therefore your life should be shit.”
“What you’ve got is what you deserve.”
There is also a culture of punching down, as commenter Lisa has observed. America has a high-violence, high-bullying society. As Lisa noted you can have a high-violence society in which it is considered unacceptable to attack the weak (doing so is viewed as cowardice), but that’s not the case in America.
In American culture, the weak are the preferred target. Failure is punishable by homelessness, suffering, and death. Sick people sure don’t deserve proper pain medication. Poor people are poor because they “don’t add value.” If you’re poor, you definitely shouldn’t have good healthcare, because if you don’t have money, you don’t deserve money, and that’s because you’re a waste of space.
This appears to be a result of something simple: At every stage of American life, it’s a zero or negative sum game, and who gets ahead is decided by authority figures. Need to get into a good university? You need good grades from adults, you need to have done the right extra-curricular activities, you need references from adults.
On the job, only a few people will be promoted, and the competition is fierce. But worse, in many fields, people are often let go, and the competition to avoid getting fired or laid off is severe.
Who decides? Your boss. You’d better get down on your knees and do whatever your boss wants, because if you’re fired or let go you may never work again, and if you do hang on at a bottom-wage job, well, your life will suck.
When dealing with police, the constant American attitude is OBEY. If you don’t obey, then whatever the police do to you is justified. The police are like bosses in a way. One cop can ruin your life, even if you aren’t killed, beaten, or raped by them. A criminal record means you will never have a good job again.
OBEY. ACQUIESCE.
On your knees, citizen.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)
And as my friend Stirling once noted, the next demand after, “Kneel!” is, “On your belly, worm.”
Failure to comply means your advancement is over, and maybe your job.
Americans are desperate for the approval of those in power, because without it, they are destroyed. This is true to a lesser extent in many other Western societies, certainly in Britain.
Having learned that the right way to treat anyone who is weaker than them is with demands for acquiescence and dominance displays, to many Americans, to interpret any sign of weakness as requiring them, as a moral duty, to dominate and hurt the weak person.
People become what is required of them. They learn from authority figures how to behave.
The desperate need of certain demographics to keep, say, women or certain minorities down is part of this. These people need to know that there are some people who, no matter how degraded their own situation, are always lower than them, can always be beaten down.
Contrary what many right-wingers think, dominance structures aren’t innate to humanity. Evidence supports that, for most of human existence, we were hopelessly egalitarian. But surplus combined with scarcity changes that, as do large populations.
Still, while high-density agricultural and industrial societies are innately more inequal than paleolithic hunter-gathers, there is plenty of variation, and within that variation plenty more variation as regards to the level of meanness and cruelty–how much a culture can be defined as “bullying.” In the modern, Western world, America ranks high as a mean, bullying culture.
The effects of this cascade, and can be seen as high up as America’s constant wars, drone assassinations, and the routine torture in prisons, and as low down as cities passing by-laws that the homeless can’t be fed or the desperate competition amongst parents and school-children for those few elite university slots which virtually ensure one’s future.
The entire process makes America a far more unpleasant place to live or visit than is necessary. The structure of dominance, meanness and cruelty is palpable to the visitor, and distressing; even as it warps the best inhabitant.
I find myself without a real conclusion. Obviously (I hope), this is BAD. Obviously it should change. But it’s hard to change something that people have taken and turned into a moral imperative: Be mean to the weak and poor, who deserve their fates. Kick down, kiss up, because a failure to pucker up can have you thrown out of the charmed circle, and obviously higher-ups want to see you acting like them, imitation being the most sincere form of flattery.
It’s all very depressing, all very unnecessary, and all very much in the interests of the people who run your society. Meanness in the chattel means they can rarely get together to challenge the masters, because they hate each other more than they hate the masters.
Kindness is a revolutionary act.
(Apropos to the recent conversation about “Good Germans” I am kicking this back to the top – Ian.)
Peter was the kindest man I ever met. I moved into his old house one winter in the early nineties. Rent was $235/month, there was a shared kitchen and showers and 7 tenants. On the ground floor lived the landlord—Peter, and his Japanese wife.
I lived there three years. They were thin, cold years for me. Sometimes I was employed—as a bike courier, a dispatcher, a mover, a baker, a painter, or anything else I could find. Other times I scrabbled from day job to day job, helping anyone who needed it for cash on the barrelhead. There were some grim months on welfare, some trips to the food bank, even a few meals at the soup kitchen. I was rousted a couple times by rent-a-cops as “undesirable” (read: looking like a bum).
My clothes were threadbare, and I would look in the mirror and I could already see myself at fifty, living the same hand to mouth, job-to-job life.
Through it all, two people helped me, two people stuck by me and never made me feel worthless. One of them was Peter. Peter let me work a lot of my rent off with jobs around the house. I painted this or that, under careful supervision I did plumbing work; I shoveled snow; and I laid bricks. Peter taught me how to learn—he’d show me how to do something, tell me to, “Do it right, and take your time, because if you do it fast first, you’ll never ever do it right.” And those months when I was late on rent, those months when I was mortified to be on welfare – he cut me slack and he never made me feel small.
Peter was old. He had been born in Germany. And he had fought for Hitler.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)
He liked to talk about his life–and quite a life it had been. He’d been a spy for the CIA after the fall, until the day his handler cut him loose when he was fleeing from what would become East Germany, pursued by Soviet troops. “Not willing to risk an incident,” said his handler. “Not willing to keep spying for you,” said Peter. He had been a stage manager, had been Volkswagen’s chief North American tester, had been a translator and had broken codes, among many, many other things.
Peter said, and I believed, that his family had been opposed to the Nazis. His father was a VP in Siemens and when Peter was caught, at a youth camp, listening to Allied broadcasts, he was able to save his son and have him assigned as an aide to a prison camp (no, not that type of prison camp) commandant. While there, Peter got himself in more trouble and wound up in the camp jail for a couple of days. The cells in that camp faced each other, with a row of bars in between. The prisoner across from him was a gypsy man and they spent two days playing cards and talking. At the end of it, the prisoner said, “Today I will be hung as a partisan. You seem like a good man, so I want to ask you if after the war you will go tell my people.”
Peter agreed, and the gypsy continued. “They think I am a partisan leader – someone other than I am. I haven’t told them they’re wrong. What I want you to do, after the war, is go tell my people that I died for this man.”
As the war ground on, the Germans began to run into severe manpower shortages. Young teenagers Peter’s age were drafted and sent into occupation duties, where they served alongside older veterans. Peter was drafted and sent to France.
He said there was very little real resistance in the district he was in (or, as far as he could tell, most of France) – just one sniper they chased in desultory fashion and never caught – the chasing mostly involving staying absolutely silent and still at night while waiting for a muzzle flash at which to aim.
One day, he went through a French hospital town. Because it was used to care for injured soldiers, it had never been bombed. While there, he and a comrade saw Allied bombers overhead. The French pointed up and said, “Look, our planes!” Peter screamed at them to get into the bomb shelters, but most of them didn’t. After all, they were their planes. Peter and his friend got in – then the bombs started falling. A lot of the French who had wondered at those planes didn’t survive that day.
He also went through Dresden the day after the bombing. But he never described what he saw there to me.
I asked Peter why he left Germany and emigrated to Canada. His reply was, “Everyone pretended they didn’t know what had been going on. We all knew. I couldn’t live there anymore.”
I lived with Peter for three years and when I left he told me two things. One was a piece of advice on living life: “Never do the same job for more than five years, Ian, you won’t be happy if you do.” (He was right, as I found out the hard way. Wisdom, they say, is learning from other people’s mistakes. I’ve never been wise.)
The second thing he said was, “My family has a custom where every year we pick out someone to help and do so for the entire year, and sometimes longer. We know we do harm all the time. It’s not balance. But we hope it makes up.”
But it wasn’t just one person. I never saw Peter act meanly, or unkindly. I never saw him treat anyone but with dignity. I never saw anyone who needed a kindness Peter could give who didn’t get it.
That man, who fought for Hitler, might have been the best man I’ve ever met.
(Originally posted April 18, 2010.)
Science advances one funeral at a time – Max Planck
For years it has been clear that real change wouldn’t come until the current generation of politicians and apparatchniks died off or were forced to retire in large numbers due to age.
One of Machiavelli’s maxims was that people don’t change. They learn whatever lessons they’re going to learn, become who they are, and then act much the same no matter what happens.
What we’re seeing with Sanders’ numbers makes this clear. He’s winning 90 percent+ of the under 30 brigade. In the Scottish independence referendum, we saw that minus the pensioner brigade, Scotland would have left Great Britain. Corbyn’s supporters tilt young.
And so on.
Now, these are very young people, being led by the very old: Sanders is a true civil rights baby, someone who actually walked the walk in the early 60s. Corbyn is a largely unreconstructed British social Labour politician from the sixties.
The left is being led by the remains of the last actually socialist generation. (Hilary’s close to that age, but was a conservative “Goldwater girl,” and she acts like it.)
But the people who are flocking to those oldsters are young, young, young.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)
And the people who are blocking left-wing change are generally old. Remember the Reagan Democrats? The Boomers, Silents, and GIs who gave their middle finger to the Great Society so long as they could have their nice suburban homes free of of “icky” black people?
As they die, change becomes possible.
They aren’t going to change their minds at this stage in their lives, the status quo is what they know and what they want.
What goes around, comes around. There is no end to history till we go extinct. The conservative era was never going to last forever.
What it has done is last too long–long enough to lock us into a rather nasty future. And because the conservatives have resisted any reasonable change from the left at all costs, there is a good chance some form of fascism will come to control many core countries.
This was expected. I’ve been warning for years that economic failure was setting up the conditions for fascism: You are more likely to get a Hitler or Mussolini instead of an FDR.
But, those on the inside, who are successful, don’t listen to those on the outside (like myself). They see no reason to do so, because they are “the winners” and the people on the outside are “the losers,” and why would you listen to losers?
And so, here we are. Good riddance to those who refused to deal with climate change and who presided over nearly 40 years of economic stagnation and decline.
The only problem is they have died too slowly. All humanity will pay the price.
(Caveat: You may be, and probably are, of the same age, and you’re probably a nice, good person who did not support these horrible policies. There are always some “Good Germans.”
The Hippies were great people who were right about almost everything. They also were a small minority who lost the culture wars.
So don’t take this post personally, though I know many of you will. (For the record, I think Gen-X, my generation, is pretty awful.)
Margin is about 4 percent for Hillary. Trump’s victory is crushing.
Sanders won the majority of Hispanics, but African Americans broke hard for Clinton.
It seems unlikely that Sanders will win South Carolina, given the make-up of its primary voters.
Much of this depends upon whether Bernie’s momentum in the polls continues. African Americans are an important constituency, but if he can extend his numbers with Hispanics and women, he’ll be in good shape.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)
As for Trump, I don’t see a scenario that doesn’t involve his health, where he isn’t the Republican presidential candidate.
If he runs against Clinton, a lot of Sanders working class voters are going to vote for him, not Clinton, but his bashing of minorities may cost him the election. Unlike mainstream pundits, I am not 100 percent certain of that: After all, mainstream pundits also said there was no way Trump could win a primary.
(Update: I wasn’t going to comment on Jeb dropping out since he’s been such a non-factor, but I think it’s worth noting that he did speak out against Trump’s demonization of Hispanics and his anti-Muslim ban. That said, the fact that Trump said George Bush Jr. lied the US into Iraq and still won this primary is revealing.)
Hilary Clinton Secretary of State Portrait
Democratic party super-delegates are unelected officials, Congressmembers, and DNC members.
They are overwhelmingly in favor of Clinton. There are 712 of them, 2,382 delegates are required to win.
Super-delegates were put in place exactly and precisely to stop a candidate like Sanders, who has little to no institutional support. (Remember, Obama did have plenty of insider support.)
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, head of the DNC, said “Superdelegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grass-roots activists.”
So, if Sanders wins the majority of elected primary delegates, but Clinton has enough super-delegate support to win, will she do it?
Of course.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)
I have no doubt that Clinton would. She has wanted to be President for so long, and has run her campaign as a coronation. She feels entitled to it, and seems genuinely convinced that she would be a better President–and that people who vote for Sanders are fools.
So the real question is whether superdelegates pledged to Clinton would actually vote for her if it meant overturning the Democratic will of the party.
To do so would be disastrous. I suspect it would cost Clinton and Democrats the election. I’m not American, but if I were, I certainly would not vote for Clinton in such a situation. I think most of the young people who are strongly for Clinton wouldn’t either.
The effects would ripple forwards in time, as well, proving to youngsters that the game is rigged, and that Democrats can’t be trusted.
So many party insiders owe Clinton everything. Those who don’t are mostly aligned with Obama, who has appeared to back Clinton so far. Loyalty means a great deal to these people, it is the liquid coin of insider party politics.
I suspect they would not be so foolish as to throw the primary to Clinton, but it’s not inconceivable. I imagine the plan would be to use Scalia’s empty Supreme Court as blackmail. The Court has always been their go-to “you-have-no-choice but-to-vote-for-us-even-though-we-suck” issue.
I’d guess that super-delegates won’t be an issue in the end. They’ll go where the elected delegates are, or the issue will be made moot by Clinton winning or Bernie crushing her.
But there’s a huge landmine here, and it’s one that could damage the Democratic party for decades.
It’s also ethically despicable, in my opinion, but then that phrase describes everything about Schultz and other insiders who feel they run a political party for their own benefit, and not that of the country.
In ten days, we have raised $3,312 in one-time donations, and $140 in recurring donations. Counting recurring donations at three times, we have raised $3,732
If we reach 6K, I will write 12 reviews about the books which shaped my understanding of the world, and six reviews about books of contemporary interest.
If we reach 9K, I’ll write an e-booklet between 30 and 50K words on The Construction of Reality.
In general, the more I raise, the more I will write.
Sincere thanks to all those who have given.
Sanders-021507-18335- 0004
Fourty-seven to fourty-four. Within the margin of error, but given the very well established trend, I’m inclined to believe it.
Clinton went down fighting against Obama (which I admired), and I’m sure she’ll go down fighting against Bernie, but at this point, absent some shocking news, I think she’s done.
I really don’t understand Clinton’s campaign. She seemed to feel so entitled to people’s votes that she didn’t even bother to pander and lie. No you can’t have a $15 minimum wage, universal health care, free tuition, Glass-Steagall, or most other things.
I’m glad she told the truth, mind you, but it’s still strange to see someone so blind to political realities.
(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)
Clinton has run almost entirely on her biography, on being “capable,” without seeming to understand that her biography includes a lot of actions that primary voters might find objectionable.
She has assumed that women would vote for her, in effect, because she is a woman, and that minorities would stay massively in her column.
Right now only African Americans are holding steady for her; the numbers on virtually every other group are breaking for Bernie.
This is going to get super-ugly, because Clinton can’t win based on who she is, or on her platform, so she’s going to have to fling every piece of mud she can find and hope that something sticks.
She can’t even run on being more electable, because polls are increasingly showing Bernie does better against Cruz or Trump. He even does better than her in a three-way competition with Bloomberg.
This is going to be the most interesting election season of my life. I suppose it already is. Get out the popcorn, and roast your weenies. We may be roasting on fires in the antechamber of Hell, depending on who wins, but at least it’s fascinating.
