The Many Faces of US Politics...

[seafoid]

Clinton is ahead 2 million on the popular vote

[seafoid]

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/the-mind-of-donald-trump/480771/

[seafoid]

https://www.yahoo.com/katiecouric/2016-the-choice-hate-speech-intensifies-since-trump-won-the-election-180840470.html

[stew]

Remember during the election we heard that Trump had all of his support coming from "non college educated white people".

No we didn't hear that.

Don't be trite, plenty on here made his supporters out to be uneducated dolts, towing the liberal line.

The same gobshites talk about Fox news a lot also, its what they do.

[Declan]

Thought this was an interesting article;

The Economy's Hidden Illness — One Even Trump Failed to Address

How financial markets no longer support business, and thus, economic growth

By Rana Foroohar

Markets typically react more to economic fundamentals than politics. But these are not typical times, and our economic future is deeply entangled with the political economy.

Donald Trump's presidential victory fundamentally challenges the future of globalization and status quo capitalism. Indeed, the fact that Trump grabbed an unexpected share of minority vote, as well as some college educated women, speaks to the fact that economic anxiety is about more than just income levels. It's about the fact that a large percentage of the population feels that we have a rigged economic system that disproportionately benefits the US and global elite. Nevermind that Trump is one of those elites. He ran as a challenger to Hillary Clinton, the ultimate establishment political figure and sold the electorate on the idea that he was the face of change.

How did we get here? Despite the economic progress made since 2008, our current recovery has been the longest, slowest one of the post World War II era, and the level of inequality is as high as it has been since the Gilded Era. The key reason is something that neither candidate in the 2016 cycle addressed fully – the fact that the financial markets themselves are no longer supporting business, and thus, economic growth.

Why is this? Because the financial industry has, according to a large body of data, grown too large and too far removed from its original mission of investing in new, productive ventures. This illness has a name: academics call it financialization. It's a term for the trend by which Wall Street and its way of thinking have come to reign supreme in America, permeating not just Wall Street but all American business.

It includes the growth in size and scope of finance and financial activity in our economy (which has doubled since the 1970s), to the rise of debt-fueled speculation over productive lending, to the ascendancy of shareholder value as the sole model for corporate governance (and the short term pressure that puts on companies), to the enormous political power of the financial lobby. It's a shift that has even affected our language, our civic life, and our way of relating to one another. We speak about human or social "capital" and securitize everything from education to critical infrastructure to prison terms, a mark of our burgeoning "portfolio society."

This isn't the way it was supposed to be. Market capitalism, as envisioned by Adam Smith, was supposed to funnel our collective savings into productive investment, via the banking system. But today, deep academic research shows that only around 15% of the money flowing from financial institutions actually makes its way into business investment. The rest gets moved around a closed financial loop, via the buying and selling of existing assets, like real estate, stocks, and bonds.

It's a cycle that increases inequality, since the top quarter of the population owns the vast majority of those assets (witness the disconnect between the markets and Main Street, which has fueled much of the populist sentiment in the election cycle).

The financial sector — including everything from banks, to hedge funds to mutual funds to insurance to trading houses — represents around 7% of the economy. Yet it creates only 4% of all US jobs, and takes 25% of all private sector profits. While a healthy financial system is crucial for growth, research by numerous academics as well as institutions like the Bank of International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund shows that when finance gets that big, it starts to suck the economic air out of the room – and in fact, the slower growth effect starts happening when the sector is half the size it is today in the US.

It's crucial that we tackle this issue to ensure not only more sustainable growth, but more stable politics. A recent Harvard survey found that only 19 % of millenials, now the largest voting bloc in the country, consider themselves "capitalists." Ironically, our next president—an investor known for highly leveraged real estate deals — has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of our financialized system.

Yet if the next administration doesn't take serious steps to reconnect the markets to Main Street, we will find ourselves in the same slow growth economy in four years. Only this time, the politics will be even more extreme—and there may be new outsiders to challenge the status quo.

[easytiger95]

Non-college educated means that the people within that demographic did not go to college- it does not mean that they are not educated in any other sense. It was also used mainly by pollsters as it is one of their main ways of differentiating voters for measurement.

But if being called non-college educated, when you are, in fact, non-college educated, is your reason for voting for a vicious, bigoted, sexual predator, then I believe the term "snowflake" applies. Whitey, would you not be giving those people a boot up the hole for their sensitivity?

The transition is falling apart, it's hilarious. Trump is too incompetent to be a dictator.

[seafoid]

Non-college educated means that the people within that demographic did not go to college- it does not mean that they are not educated in any other sense. It was also used mainly by pollsters as it is one of their main ways of differentiating voters for measurement.

But if being called non-college educated, when you are, in fact, non-college educated, is your reason for voting for a vicious, bigoted, sexual predator, then I believe the term "snowflake" applies. Whitey, would you not be giving those people a boot up the hole for their sensitivity?

The transition is falling apart, it's hilarious. Trump is too incompetent to be a dictator.

You should patent that last last line, ET

[seafoid]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdLUV0hhYZY

[Declan]

Journalists are helping to create a dangerous consensus

Brexit vote and US election showed media's failure to ask the really difficult questions
Declan Lawn

If the job of investigative journalism is to put new and relevant facts into the public domain, then the American media performed relatively well during the recent presidential campaign, and in some cases, it did brilliantly.

The "hot mic" tapes and Donald Trump's tax returns were, by anyone's standards, excellent scoops and most probably, in any election before this one, they might have ended the hopes of a presidential candidate. But not this time. This time, the facts no longer mattered.

We've heard a lot recently about the concept of a "post-factual society" and there has been a great deal of debate about what that means.

Some say it's a society where facts no longer exist; in fact it's a society where they exist, but don't matter.

In that scenario, serious investigative journalism finds itself in the novel position of making less and less impact.

Until relatively recently, a methodical piece of revelatory investigative journalism could expect to produce two results – outrage on behalf of its readership and audience, and shame on behalf of its target.

Fifteen years ago when I first went to work as a reporter for Panorama, the BBC current affairs and investigative programme, we could count on a general set of moral and ethical assumptions shared across society and work out pretty well how our journalism would play in them.

If you did a story about how a tycoon was treating his minimum-wage workers terribly and you told it with compelling testimony, perhaps with secret filming and supported by documentary evidence, you could pretty much guarantee that when it went out on prime-time television, the audience would be outraged.

Then, almost certainly, the "shame" element would follow, like a necessary bedfellow. We could expect a mea culpa from the tycoon, perhaps a public apology and a declared determination to make things better.

All of that is changing fast. One of the greatest changes I have noticed in journalism is that stories we would consider to be important no longer make the impact we expected.

So why is that? A simple and rather superficial answer – although it contains a lot of truth – is social media. Outrage is in short supply because it is a muscle that has been over-used. The human heart can only summon so much outrage.

If you are checking your Twitter feed 20 times a day, the chances are that on a fairly regular basis you are seeing sights that most humans were, until recently, rarely exposed to. A dead baby in the ruins of Aleppo; a mother holding her child, killed in a chemical attack; a teenager who has been run over by a lorry in a terrorist attack in France.

Most big broadcasters have "ingest editors" – people whose job it is to look at the raw footage sent in from all over the world, and to cut out the horror that cannot be shown on mainstream television.

It's a tough job and people who do it regularly receive breaks from it as well as counselling to help them deal with it.

These days, we're all ingest editors, but without the breaks or the counselling.

In that context, the human capacity for outrage becomes exhausted very quickly.

You cannot be outraged all of the time and so when you hear news of another political scandal or tax-evading business person, the moral and emotional bank is empty.

Take the concept of shame. These days if you're the centre of a big story and you have done wrong, you can be almost guaranteed it will blow over.

An entire industry of crisis management PR consultants has grown up around the task of telling clients to sit tight.

And the brutal truth about shame, both the public and private kind, is that too often it is a factor of expectation; those who think the punishment will be fleeting or non-existent feel it a great deal less.

In today's political climate, would US president Richard Nixon have been impeached? Would he have resigned? I don't believe so.

He might instead simply send out a tweet saying his enemies were out to get him, and God Bless America, and now it's time to move on – and we all would.

So, how have we got here? It starts with the financial crisis of 2008. When the history books are written, the seismic political events of the past year will be traced to that beginning.

Before, during, and after the 2008 crash, serious journalism dropped the ball. Because we knew, didn't we? We knew.

In Belfast, London and Dublin, we knew on some instinctive common-sense level but we subjugated our instincts to the judgments of experts who did not exist. We knew it didn't feel right, that it was unsustainable.

But as journalists we missed it. Or more to the point, we didn't tell it, until it came from the bottom up and could not be ignored – until it had already happened.

The central issue is that journalists buy into narratives just like everybody else and just like everybody else we can be wrong on a collective and massive scale. This is no surprise – we are not supernatural sages.

The problem is that we are getting ever worse at going against the dominant consensus. Fewer and fewer of us are anti-authoritarian enough and difficult enough to go with our gut and challenge the narrative.

These days journalists are not rewarded for being difficult. A culture does not exist in which a journalist can render an alternative narrative without being dismissed as a loonie leftie or alt-right conspiracy theorist.

Thirty years ago journalists questioned dominant narratives all the time – it was what journalists were for.

Today, questioning the consensus is a dangerous game; whether it's the consensus of neoliberalism or military interventionism or whatever – it gets you called a "conspiracy theorist". This is how journalism fails.

As humans we have instincts about things we see around us. Intuition. Common sense. And as journalists, we have a duty to follow these observations wherever they take us, even if it is against the prevailing wisdom.

Yet now, too many of us have had that instinct trained out of us; we stay with the herd, even when there are no real fences us around to hold us in – just our own expectations and those of our peers.

I should point out, if it isn't already obvious, I am entirely guilty of the sin of which I speak. I spent a decade travelling around the UK doing Panorama after Panorama.

The subjects were diverse – welfare cuts, the National Health Service, undercover investigations into criminals, migrant labour exposés – I put a lot of facts out into the world and as far as I know they were all correct.

But the bigger story was the one all around me. It was what I was seeing in towns such as Stoke and Scunthorpe, Merthyr Tydfil and Bradford. It was the despair. The grim, grinding, daily despair in the lives of so many of the people I met.

And yet I had no way to tell it as a story, to sum it all up, to tie it together, even though I felt it instinctively. I never even suggested it. I should have. And then on June 23rd in the vote on EU membership it became a story after all.

So how have we failed? We have failed in America and the UK by narrowing the acceptable boundaries of investigative journalism.

We have failed by allowing a climate of intellectual adventure to wither away from journalism, the one part of society that should support voices who seriously and thoughtfully challenge the dominant narratives that shape our world.

We have allowed ourselves to become a herd of sheep, and the more closely the herd bunches together, the smaller the corner of the field it takes up.

Pretty soon we think this corner of the field is the whole field.

But it isn't – it's just our corner.

So is there a way forward? I think so. First, mainstream newspapers and broadcasters need to fundamentally change the kind of content they commission.

They need to seek out voices on the extremes of right and left instead of allowing new, single-politics media outlets grow up at the fringes.

They should feature these voices and interrogate them, holding them to the standard we all aspire to – of fact-based reason. Bring everyone into the tent. See how they hold up under questioning.

Journalists need to pull off the greatest trick of all – to recognise the limits of their own perceptions and try to exceed them. To see that there might be another narrative and another way of looking at the world.

We need to use journalistic rigour to stress-test the basic assumptions we all live under.

We need to question the consensus because the only thing that is certain is that the consensus nearly always turns out to be wrong. As a journalist, I look forward to it all, now that everything has changed.

In a way, I find these strange, dark and ridiculous times to be exciting. They say that soldiers need wars. Journalists too get stale without a fight. We should get out of the corner of the field and go looking for one.

This is an edited version of a contribution to the Cleraun Media Conference on Investigative Journalism on the Digital Frontier held last weekend in Dublin. Declan Lawn is a reporter with BBC Current Affairs, working mainly for Panorama and BBC Northern Ireland's Spotlight programme.

[seafoid]

The ADL analysed the data 
https://www.yahoo.com/katiecouric/2016-the-choice-hate-speech-intensifies-since-trump-won-the-election-180840470.html

Over 12 months there were 2.6 million antisemitic messages on twitter. From 1600 accounts, And 10bn impressions. This is Mr Bannon.

[Billys Boots]

Thanks for that Declan, good read. 

[whitey]

Non-college educated means that the people within that demographic did not go to college- it does not mean that they are not educated in any other sense. It was also used mainly by pollsters as it is one of their main ways of differentiating voters for measurement.

But if being called non-college educated, when you are, in fact, non-college educated, is your reason for voting for a vicious, bigoted, sexual predator, then I believe the term "snowflake" applies. Whitey, would you not be giving those people a boot up the hole for their sensitivity?

The transition is falling apart, it's hilarious. Trump is too incompetent to be a dictator.

Lol.....keep ignoring and issues and keep up the name calling. 

[muppet]

One thing came up in conversation today that I hadn't even thought of before

Remember during the election we heard that Trump had all of his support coming from "non college educated white people".

How fvcking condescending can you get.....I know plenty of trades people over here.....electricians, diesel mechanics, HVAC guys .....who spend years at trade schools, learning trades and doing apprenticeships . They are just as smart and equally, if not more informed as many of the smarmy fvcks looking down their noses at them

You need to find another setting, other than outraged.

The election is over. You won. Get over it.

[seafoid]

Trump is looking for access all areas for his kids. It's worse than FF

[sid waddell]

Britain's Number One columnist Jeremy Hopkiss is back in today's Daily Heil, and boy does he tell it like it is!

STOP MOANING AND GET OVER IT, YOU PC FASCISTS!

HOPKISS AT LARGE ON THE US ELECTION - TELLING IT LIKE IT IS!

The PC Fascists are at it again.

Moaning because Donald Trump, who so fearlessly dared to call out the lefty liberal PC brigade for what they are, won a stunning victory in America.

Moaning about racism, moaning about anti-semitism, moaning about misogyny, moaning about mocking disabled people, moaning about everything, really.

Well I have a message for the sneering liberals, who talk in sneering tones, who want nothing more than to censor good, decent, hardworking people like you and me.

You LOST! Donald Trump WON! The fact is the majority of the people voted for him. Shut up and get over it, you moaners!

They moan because Trump dared to tell it like it is. That political correctness has ruined public discourse. That people are sick of being told what to think. That people aren't allowed speak their mind. Trump, thankfully, brought a dose of good old common sense.

The hand-wringing do-gooders, the bullies that attempt to clamp down on free speech would have you believe that women can't bring rape upon themselves, that blacks aren't entirely to blame for their own problems, that if good, decent, hardworking people want to keep the Muslims out, it isn't justified by the Muslims' own actions, that we shouldn't be allowed object to having to look at men holding hands with each other in public. Where's the culture of personal responsibility?

The sneering anti-intellectualism at the heart of the lefty liberal movement is clear. They tell us that America has a gun problem. They tell us that people aren't paid enough. They tell us that financial regulation is a good thing. They tell us the planet is warming up. They cite "facts".Well guess what - we're sick of "experts"!

Trump has been unfairly victimised by the bullies. He wants to make America great again. He stood up for the little people. He knows that by making people stand up on their own two feet, he's freeing them from the shackles of the tyranny of social security, the tyranny of Obamacare, the tyranny of government interference, the tyranny of trade unions, the tyranny of Mexican immigrants coming in and taking their jobs, the tyranny of the thieving taxman, the tyranny of the gaystapo and the feminazis, the tyranny of regulation. No longer will the pyjama-wearing welfare queens sponge off the state. They will be forced to make their own way in life. Wealth creators will be allowed to flourish and the market will be allowed work its magic. This is true freedom.

Free of the cronyism of the liberal elites, the blue-collar billionaire has drained the swamp, he's drained the stench of liberal corruption. Now honest men like Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, John Bolton, Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie and Mike Pence can fight for the people.

And we in Britain can be proud to say we led the way by standing up for ourselves against Europe. We rose, America followed.

Real people are sick of the cultural Marxism that has been constantly shoved down our throats by the biased lefty liberal media. They say if you dislike gays, you're a homophobe, if you dislike blacks, you're a racist, if you dislike Muslims, you're an Islamophobe, if you dislike Jews, you're an anti-semite.

Well, guess what, lefty liberals? Real people are sick of being told what to think. This is a real revolution.

Free speech has won.

So, PC brigade, I've got one message for you. Suck it up and shut up!

Because one likes a whinge, do they?