02-23-2017, 06:00 PM
(02-23-2017, 04:55 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: States like MI and PA where Trump won are befuddling. Obviously this does not include you personally, but now they look like complete dupes and fools. It's disgusting they could not see what Trump would be like in November and now have buyer's remorse. Lots of Lefties on here go on and on about voter suppression versus participation but I am increasingly of a mind that fewer rather than more people should vote. Unless voters can be less foolish, what would be so wrong about having to meet certain qualifications in order to vote?
In the classic bait-and-switch fraud a gullible customer is lured into a crooked furniture dealer with the advertisement of something too good to be true that is shown to be inadequate to the customer or, if the customer insists, "sold out". The salesman then tries to entice the gullible customer into buying something both overpriced and shoddy. A bit more than one expected in price? There is easy credit with 'easy payments'. So one gets overpriced furniture that isn't any good on a contract with loan-shark interest. I've known people who got taken.
But Demagogue Don played an even nastier fraud. He found that millions of people are in economic distress, left behind as the share of economic activity in manufacturing shrinks. He never was quite clear about where the 'good manufacturing jobs' would come from... but they apparently have a price. Tax cuts for the super-rich, regulatory relief, business subsidies, sponsorship of monopoly pricing, gutting of workers' rights. The benefits all go to someone else, yet the worker gets to pay for it. So you buy the sofa, and you find that you are making payments on a sofa that the owner has given to one of his family members! Such is what I see in Trump economics.
In good times people are not so gullible. They recognize that one does not get something without giving up something else in exchange. But quality for quality is a good deal. Real prosperity depends upon people making enough good stuff or doing enough good deeds that people are getting good lives.
...When the Trump nightmare is over we are going to need to restructure our educational system to make people more adept at critical thought, more aware of elementary economics, more competent at recognizing cons and fleeces, and more skilled in using basic logic. We need to recognize that K-12 education once more than adequate to churn out millions of clerks and laborers is not enough when we no longer need so much raw labor to achieve what we must. Maybe our world is so much more complicated that people can no longer be adequate as participants in adult roles in society at 18 (the usual end of high school).
When I saw the slogan "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN" I recognized something that one many would read into whatever they wanted to read into it. People concerned about abortion probably assumed that "GREAT AGAIN" meant "free of abortion". For people of modest skill and no prospects, "GREAT AGAIN" might mean "plenty of well-paid work"... well, when there is much work and little pay attached, that won't be so great. "GREAT AGAIN" for white racists might mean that white privilege might be restored. (before WWII "white privilege really meant "WASP privilege", as almost all Polish-Americans and Italian-Americans (and most Irish-Americans)_ were dirt-poor, so people need beware of any racist agenda). I saw it and assumed the worst -- that it would be a return to the economic agenda of reactionaries who would be perfectly happy if the got to know the wondrous times of yore, when child labor was the norm, when employers needed not deal with unions, when Social Security did not exist, when smokestacks belching toxic wastes into the air were symbols of prosperity the Klan kept blacks 'in their place'... back to the 1920s, if not the Gilded Age.
Yes, Donald Tru8mp says he is a "friend of coal"... really,m the coal barons, if not the miners. This is what made America great, as far as Donald Trump sees it,
Quote:Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man's made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong
You loadsixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
Read more: Tennessee Ernie Ford - Sixteen Tons Lyrics | MetroLyrics
Coal mining has always been a hard, dirty, dangerous job that leads to black lung -- at least the United Mine Workers made sure that coal miners got to get the consumer goodies normal in American life. I doubt that President Trump will do much good for miners. He might compel America to burn more coal so that coal barons can wax fatter... but the miners will get pay cuts. I expect disability benefits to become harder to get. Thus more people will have to compete for the worst-paying jobs, as in retail sales.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.